



WSSnmSx 

mSssSSmam 



wRBSgSBBSffl 

mmm 

Hi!! 







k -'* 



,/ 






^ 






jr* 



y°* 






♦.To' a^ <=>, *»!•>* a9 ^J* *e«o° •$> 



°o 













6°* 



^6* 

^ aP »i^:* * v si 







^ 



V-0 










THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 






THE SPIRIT OF 
DEMOCRACY 

BY 

LYMAN ABBOTT 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

(Cfce fitoer#be $re&£ Cambridge 

1910 



>* 



&\ 



COPYRIGHT, I91O, BY LYMAN ABBOTT 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published November iqio 



©CIA278C 



PREFACE 

Democracy, as defined by Abraham Lincoln, — 
Government of the people, for the people, and 
by the people, — dates from the middle, or latter 
part, of the eighteenth century. " The short-lived 
Athenian democracy," says Sir Henry Sumner 
Maine, " under whose shelter art, science, and 
philosophy shot so wonderfully upwards, was only 
an aristocracy which rose on the ruins of one 
much narrower." The early Roman Republic was 
republic only in name, and although in its sub- 
sequent history the power of the people was con- 
siderably enlarged, there never was a time when 
Rome was truly governed either by the people or 
in their interests. That democracy, in the modern 
sense of the term, is essentially modern, is indi- 
cated by the fact that the two oldest buildings de- 
voted to government assemblies which represent 
the people, are both of them in America. It is of 
democracy in its modern sense that I treat in 
this volume. 

Sir Henry Maine affirms that democracy " is 
simply and solely a form of government." In 
this volume I assume that it is something more. 



vi PREFACE 

It is a spirit which, in so far as a spirit can be 
embodied in a creed, may be expressed by the 
statement that not only government, but wealth, 
education, art, literature, religion, — in a single 
word, life, — is, in the divine order, intended for 
the people, and, in the ultimate state of society, 
will be controlled and administered by the peo- 
ple for the benefit of all. Thus defined, demo- 
cracy is not only a political opinion, it is also a 
religious faith. What this faith means, and what 
we in this age and country can do to promote it, 
and apply it to the solution of our various prob- 
lems, are the questions to which I invite the 
consideration of the reader. 

In the winter of 1909-10 I gave a course of 
lectures before the Brooklyn Institute of Arts 
and Sciences on "The Spirit of Democracy." 
This volume is composed of the substance of 
those lectures rewritten and somewhat ampli- 
fied and extended. Although rewritten for book 
publication it is probable they still partake some- 
what of the style and character given to them in 
their original form as spoken lectures. 

Lyman Abbott. 

CORNWALL-ON-HUDSON, 

September, 1910. 



CONTENTS 

I. The Birth of Democracy 1 

II. The Tendency of Democracy ... 14 

III. The Pagan Ideal of the Family ... 28 

IV. The Hebrew Ideal of the Family . . 44 
V. The Evolution of Education .... 59 

VI. The Home, the Church, the School . . 71 

VII. Present Conditions in Industry ... 93 

VIII. Political Socialism 109 

IX. Industrial Democracy 132 

X. The Origin and Nature of Government . 156 

XI. Who should Govern? 177 

XII. The Spirit of Democracy in Religion . 198 



THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

CHAPTER I 

THE BIRTH OF DEMOCRACY 

Every age is a transition age. But in some eras 
the transition is more rapid and more noticeable 
than in others. As sometimes in a year the girl 
develops into womanhood, as sometimes in a 
week the skeleton plant bursts into leafage and 
perhaps into bloom, so a nation, which has been 
growing silently, suddenly puts forth the evi- 
dence of its growth, and both surprises and per- 
plexes itself by the transformation. Such is the 
phenomenon now taking place in America. It is 
as though a new-created world were springing up, 
and we were taking part in the process of crea- 
tion. Nothing is as it has been. Science, litera- 
ture, education, art, politics, religion, all are 
being new-born. There is a new astronomy, 
a new biology, a new chemistry ; there are new 
methods of architecture, lighting, locomotion, 
manufacturing; new types of fiction, drama, 
poetry, philosophy; new methods of teaching 
and an immense increase in the number of sub- 



2 THE SPIRIT OP DEMOCRACY 

jects taught ; a new alignment of political parties 
and new policies as yet not even named save as 
they bear the names of some representative ex- 
pounder, as Cleveland or Bryan Democracy, or 
Roosevelt or Taf t Republicanism ; and a new 
theology which has not only shortened and sim- 
plified all creeds but has sometimes threatened 
to destroy them altogether. 

These changes are not incidental ; they are 
radical. Schumann, in " Warum ? " musically in- 
terprets the questioning spirit of the age which 
puts an interrogation point after every affirma- 
tion of the past, however long it may have been 
accepted. In industry the right of laborers to 
organize is denied by capitalists, and the right of 
capitalists to organize is denied by laborers. On 
the one hand property is so concentrated in a 
few hands for administration purposes as to fill 
thoughtful men with a not wholly unreasonable 
dread of what plutocracy may grow to, and on 
the other hand a class of Socialists appear to 
deny all right, if not of private property, at least 
of private property industrially employed. In 
politics there are both a New Jeffersouianism 
and a New Federalism. Neither the Democracy 
of Cleveland nor that of Bryan is a copy of 
Thomas Jefferson's Democracy ; neither the Fed- 
eralism of Roosevelt nor that of Cannon and Al- 



THE BIRTH OF DEMOCRACY 3 

drich is a copy of the Federalism of Alexander 
Hamilton. No Church is immune from the New 
Theology, not even the Roman Catholic Church, 
as the Pope himself by his syllabus on Modernism 
has attested. And the New Theology questions 
the basis of authority, and questions it so effect- 
ually that neither the Bible nor the Church 
speaks to even the churchman with the authority 
with which they spoke to the churchmen of a 
century ago. What does all this mean ? To what 
does it all tend ? What will it do with us ? Per- 
haps more important is the question, What can 
we do with it? 

Two democracies were born in America about 
a century and a half apart : one in the early half 
of the seventeenth century, and the other in the 
latter half of the eighteenth century ; one of 
Hebrew, the other of Latin, ancestry. They mar- 
ried. The democracy of this twentieth century 
is their child. It inherits characteristics from 
both its parents. They are not only diverse; 
they are inconsistent. The child is perplexed by 
its contradictory inheritance. He does not under- 
stand himself. If we are to understand him, we 
must understand his ancestors. 

Ten or twelve centuries before Christ there 
grew up in the Near East a new form of social 
organization which we may call thfe Hebrew Com- 



> 



*> 



4 THE SPIRIT 0^ DEMOCRACY 

monwealth. All the neighboring governments 
were absolute despotisms — all power being con- 
centrated in the hands of a single autocrat. In 
the Hebrew Commonwealth government was for 
the first time organized in three departments — 
a legislative, an executive, and a judicial. In all 
the neighboring governments the power of the 
autocrat was unlimited. In the Hebrew Common- 
wealth the king was a constitutional monarch 
whose powers were somewhat carefully limited. 
In the Hebrew Commonwealth no hereditary caste 
or class was permitted ; there was the State Church, 
but the priesthood were forbidden to become land- 
owners, and were made dependent for their sup- 
port on the voluntary offerings of the people ; 
methods of worship were carefully defined, but 
attendance on worship was not compulsory; pri- 
vate ownership in land was allowed, but only for 
a limited tenure ; labor was honorable and idle- 
ness a disgrace ; slavery, though not prohibited, 
was hedged about with such conditions that in 
the course of a few centuries it disappeared; 
woman's position, if not absolutely equal to that 
of man, was one of unexampled honor in that age ; 
provision was made for the education of all the 
children by home instruction, aided by itinerant 
school-teachers, out of which later grew the first 
popular school system in the then known world. 



THE BIRTH OF DEMOCRACY 5 

And this whole system was founded on a religion 
which had in its creed but two articles : that God 
is a righteous Father who has made man in his 
own image, between whom and man, therefore, 
the comradeship of father and son is possible ; 
that he requires of his children righteousness and 
requires nothing else, and therefore the way to 
his favor is not by sacrifices and offerings but by 
doing justly, loving mercy, and walking reverently 
in fellowship with him. 

How far this ideal was ever actually realized in 
the history of Israel is doubted by scholars. It is 
certainly incorporated in their sacred books. With > 
Christianity these sacred books, translated into the 
Latin tongue, bound together, and bearing the 
title of " The Books " (now generally, by a trans- 
literation of the Greek, "The Bible"), passed over 
into the nominally converted Roman Empire. 
Alfred the Great, the first great king and leader 
of the English people, translated portions of these 
books into the Anglo-Saxon tongue, and incor- 
porated certain of their fundamental ideals into 
the English Constitution. Gradually the political 
and religious principles of these books made their 
way, against much opposition and more indiffer- 
ence, into the life of the English people. Inspired 
by them, Simon de Montfort led the movement 
which brought representatives of the common 



6 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

people into the National Council, and created out 
of it a House of Commons. Imitating the ex- 
ample of the itinerant Levites, the " preaching 
friars" carried the simple precepts of these books 
to the homes and imbedded them in the hearts of 
the people. These principles made of Wyclif a 
social reformer before socialism, a democrat be- 
fore democracy, and a Protestant before Protest- 
antism. Tyndale carried on the work which 
Wyclif began, and created a public opinion 
which made possible Henry VIII's separation of 
the English Church from Italian control. At 
length, in the beginning of the seventeenth cen- 
tury, the long campaign between the autocratic 
principles which the English people had inherited 
from the Rome of the Cresars, culminating in the 
despotism of Charles I, and the democratic prin- 
ciples which they had inherited from the Hebrew 
Commonwealth culminating in the principles of 
the Puritans, issued in the overthrow of the Stuart 
oligarchy, and incidentally in the immigration to 
New England of Puritan and Pilgrim. These 
brought with them the purpose to found on these 
shores a new republic patterned after the Hebrew 
theocracy, embodying its social and religious prin- 
ciples, and inspired by its spirit. The earliest 
democracy in America was a Puritan child with 
a Hebrew ancestry. 



THE BIRTH OF DEMOCRACY 7 

The other democracy had a very different line- 
age, and inherited from its ancestry different prin- 
ciples and a different spirit. 

Imperial Rome was an absolute despotism, 
with labor enslaved, popular education unknown, 
marriage a commercial partnership, religion 
wholly dissociated from morality — a ceremo- 
nialism framed to appease the wrath of angry 
gods or win the favor of corruptible gods. The 
Bourbon dynasties of Italy and Spain and France 
had inherited this imperialism, modified and ame- 
liorated by a Roman Christianity. But Roman 
Christianity had done nothing to ameliorate the 
despotism of the government in France, nor much 
to promote the education of the people ; though 
under its influence slavery had given place to 
feudalism as an industrial system, and marriage 
had become, in the estimate of Christian believers, 
an indissoluble sacrament. But in the latter half 
of the eighteenth century the influence of the 
Christian Church with the common people in 
France was greatly weakened, especially in the 
great cities. The Renaissance had brought with 
it a revival of paganism ; persecution had de- 
stroyed the adherents of the reformed religion ; 
the mocking laughter of Voltaire had done more 
to shake the faith of the people in the Church of 
Rome than all the arguments of Calvin ; the vices 



8 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

of the higher clergy and their identification with 
the oppressive oligarchy had done more than Vol- 
taire. The Church retained the appearance but 
not the reality of power when it lost its hold on 
the conscience of France. It could neither inspire 
the ruling classes with a spirit of reform nor re- 
strain the passions of the mob when hunger drove 
them to desperation. The aristocracy was over- 
thrown, but the people had no other conception 
of government than government by force, and no 
other conception of liberty than the substitution 
of an unchecked rule by many for an unchecked 
rule by the few. "As nature," says Rousseau, 
"gives to every man absolute power over the mem- 
bers of his body, the social pact gives the social 
body absolute power over all its members/' 1 The 
despotism of an unrestrained mob proved to be 
as despotic as that of an unrestrained oligarchy, 
and France soon sought relief from the Reign of 
Terror in a new imperialism. 

Meanwhile the theories of the French political 
reformers had crossed the Channel into England, 
where Jacobinism proved a temporary and un- 
popular exotic. They simultaneously crossed the 
sea to America, where, mingled with and niodi- 

1 Quoted by H. A. Taine in his French Revolution, vol. iii, p. 54. 
Taine gives a graphic picture of the length to which this despot- 
ism of the majority was carried under Jacobin rule. 



THE BIRTH OF DEMOCRACY 9 

fied by the Anglo-Saxon sturdy love of individ- 
ual independence, they gave birth to a new type 
of democracy. The fundamental theory of Rous- 
seau, that government is founded on a social com- 
pact and that the authority of government is 
derived from and dependent on the will of the 
people assenting to it, found expression in the 
statement of the Declaration of Independence 
that just government rests on the consent of the 
governed. But the Anglo-Saxon love of indepen- 
dence also found expression in the statement 
that man possesses certain inalienable rights, as 
to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, 
which no pact by him or on his behalf can take 
from him. To protect the individual in these in- 
alienable rights should be the end, so said the 
advocates of the new democracy, and the sole 
end, of government. " The Constitution of Ala- 
bama," says Mr. Lecky, "expresses admirably 
the best spirit of American statesmanship when 
it states that * the sole and only legitimate end 
of government is to protect the citizen in the en- 
joyment of life, liberty, and property, and when 
the government assumes other functions it is 
usurpation and oppression/ " * 

Thus the new American democracy differed 
from the original Jacobin democracy of France 

1 W. E. H. Lecky, Democracy and Liberty, vol. i, p. 118. 



10 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

as the English monarchy had differed from the 
French monarchy. In France the democracy pos- 
sessed absolute power; in America that power 
was limited by definite checks. Absolute mon- 
archy was succeeded by absolute democracy in 
France ; the constitutional monarchy of the 
English was followed by a constitutional demo- 
cracy in America. 

At the close of the eighteenth and the begin- 
ning of the nineteenth century this naturalized 
and modified French democracy had in America 
hosts of enthusiastic and devoted disciples. How 
many, how influential, and how enthusiastic they 
were is indicated by the fact that in Yale College 
there were two Thomas Paine societies, and many 
of the students substituted for their Christian 
names the names of some chosen and idealized 
French encyclopaedists. The philosophy of this 
Latin or French democracy as modified by its 
migration to America may be summarized for my 
purpose in a paragraph, as I have endeavored to 
summarize that of the Hebrew or Puritan de- 
mocracy. 

The state of nature is the ideal state ; let us 
get back to it. In a state of nature every man is 
free to live his own life, direct his own energies, 
carve out his own destiny. Every impediment 
upon this freedom is an injury to humanity. All 



THE BIRTH OF DEMOCRACY 11 

government is such an impediment. A little 
government is absolutely necessary to protect the 
weak from the strong, but government is a nec- 
essary evil, and the less we have of it the better. 
Humanity has simply consented to it in order to 
protect itself. It should constrain only to free 
from constraint. On this consent of the governed 
government is founded. This is the basis of all 
authority. The ultimate appeal is to the people ; 
for the voice of the people is the voice of God 
— that is, if there is a God. Whether there be 
one or not, it is not material to inquire ; for the 
voice of the people is final. A just government 
is a government carried on in accordance with 
the will of the majority; an unjust government 
is one carried on not in accordance with that 
will. 

Thus at the beginning of the nineteenth cen- 
tury there were two democracies in America : 
one having its birthplace and home in New Eng- 
land, though gradually extending its influence 
beyond the boundaries of New England; the 
other having its birthplace and home in Vir- 
ginia, and much more rapidly extending its in- 
fluence beyond the boundaries of Virginia. One 
was founded on faith in God, the other was un- 
theistic if not atheistic. To one, the basis of all 
authority is the will of God ; to the other, the 



12 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

will of the majority. To one, law is the will of 
God, the expression of that will is in the Ten 
Commandments, and human laws are just only 
when they are in harmony with that will ; to the 
other, law is the expression of the will of the ma- 
jority, and any government is just which is 
founded on and is the expression of that will, 
and no other government is or can be just. One 
desired to limit the suffrage to those who were 
obedient to the will of God, though they found 
it difficult to provide a satisfactory test; the 
other believed in universal and unqualified suf- 
frage. One honored labor whether it was man- 
ual or intellectual, and condemned idleness 
whether of poverty or wealth. The other soon 
learned to engraft upon its free States a system 
of slavery not materially different from that of 
pagan Rome. One borrowed from Hebraism the 
synagogue school, transformed it into a public 
school supported by the State ; the other left 
education to be carried on by the family as a 
private enterprise, aided by the private school, by 
the Church, and by occasional charity. One was 
social, the other individual. One tended toward 
cooperation, combination, organization; the other 
toward competition. One looked forward toward 
realizing the kingdom of God on the earth, the 
other sought to return to the state of nature. 



THE BIRTH OF DEMOCRACY 13 

The motto of one was the law of Christ : One is 
your Master, even Christ, and all ye are breth- 
ren. The motto of the other was the law of the 
forest: Struggle for existence, survival of the 
fittest. 

Out of these two democracies, one the child of 
French and Roman ancestry, the other the child of 
Puritan and Hebrew ancestry, the American dem- 
ocracy of the twentieth century was born. In the 
child the contradictory characteristics of its ances- 
tors are struggling, each modifying the other. By 
the principles furnished by these two democracies 
— the individual and the social — the twentieth- 
century democracy is guided in opposite direc- 
tions. By the impulses which they furnish it is 
urged now upon the one path, now upon the 
other. 



CHAPTER II 

THE TENDENCY OF DEMOCRACY 

In which of these directions, the fraternal or the 
individual, has America been tending for the last 
hundred and thirty years ? In which of these 
directions should thoughtful Americans endeavor 
to guide the country ? 

In which direction America has been tending 
is tolerably clear to all observers, whether they 
approve or disapprove the tendency. 

The immediate occasion of the Civil War was 
the question between the sections, whether slav- 
ery was a beneficent form of industrial organiza- 
tion and should be protected throughout the Na- 
tion, or an unjust and injurious form of industrial 
organization and should be confined within its then 
existing limits in the expectation of its ultimate ab- 
olition. The proximate cause of the Civil War was 
two contrasted opinions respecting the interpreta- 
tion of a written Constitution upon two questions 
on which that Constitution was absolutely silent : 
Had a State a right to secede ? If it attempted 
to secede, had the Federal Government a right to 
compel it to remain in the Union ? But underly- 
ing both questions was the still more f undamen- 



THE TENDENCY OF DEMOCRACY 15 

tal issue between the Hebraic or Puritan concep- 
tion of government and the Latin or French con- 
ception of government. 

The doctrine that all government is founded 
on a compact, when applied to the United States, 
naturally led to the affirmation that the Nation 
was a confederation of independent and sovereign 
States. The doctrine that all government rests 
on the consent of the governed, when applied to 
such a supposed confederation, naturally led to 
the conclusion that if the consent of any one or 
more of these sovereign States was withdrawn, the 
government over them ceased to be a just govern- 
ment, and the right either of repudiation or of 
revolution followed. To Calhoun and his politi- 
cal associates this meant nullification, or the right 
of a sovereign State in the exercise of its sover- 
eignty to refuse its assent to any Federal law 
which it deemed unjust. To Jefferson Davis and 
his associates it meant the right of a sovereign 
State to withdraw from the confederacy alto- 
gether when the acts of the confederation were 
injurious to its interests. How pervasive this 
doctrine that government rests on the con- 
sent of the governed had become in America is 
evidenced by the fact that Mr. Buchanan, who 
denied the right of a state to secede, also denied 
the right of the Federal government to prevent 



16 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

secession, and that Horace Greeley, the foremost 
anti-slavery editor of the North, besought the 
nation to let the erring sisters depart in peace. 

The result of the Civil War has been to expel 
absolutely from the consciousness of the nation, 
both North and South, the doctrine that just 
government depends on the consent of the gov- 
erned. The Union of to-day is not what Horace 
Greeley feared it would be, that of a triumphant 
North over a subjugated South. It is a Union ce- 
mented by mutual respect, affection, and esteem, 
based on the tacit assumption that government 
is something more than copartnership, whether 
of individuals or of States ; that it is a divine or- 
ganism, deriving its authority, not from the con- 
sent of the governed, but from the justice with 
which the governors exercise their authority, and 
is neither founded on consent nor can be dis- 
solved by dissent. Thomas Jefferson advocated an 
occasional revolution, much as the doctors of the 
old school advocated an occasional blood-letting, 
as a useful measure of hygiene. "God forbid 
that we should be twenty years without a rebel- 
lion. We have had thirteen States independent 
for eleven years. There has been but one rebel- 
lion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and 
a half for each State. What country ever existed 
a century and a half without a rebellion ? What 



THE TENDENCY OF DEMOCRACY 17 

signifies a few lives lost in a century or two ? 
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time 
to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It 
is its natural manure.' ' * That phase of Jeffersonian- 
ism would to-day find no advocate in America in 
any section of the country. Even the wildest-eyed 
anarchist, if he ventured to affirm it, would be 
listened to, if at all, with scant politeness. 
? The doctrine that government rests on the 
consent of the governed carried with it by nec- 
essary implication that all the governed must 
have some share in making the government. 
Universal suffrage as one of the natural rights of 
man was a logically necessary element in the 
Latin theory of law and liberty. " The right to 
vote for representatives," says Professor Dun- 
ning, " was held to be an immediate corollary of 
the principle that every man was by nature free 
and could be subjected to government only by 
his consent; for government must be by law, and 
law must be the will of each individual, expressed 
either in person or through a representative." 2 
The omnipotence of the majority carried with 
it, in the minds of certain theorists, the infalli- 
bility of the majority. Strictly speaking, there 

1 W. E. Curtis, The True Thomas Jefferson, p. 81. 

2 W. A. Dunning, A History of Political Theories from Luther to 
Montesquieu, p. 236. 



18 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

was no real minority and could be none. Says 
Rousseau : — 

When a law is proposed in an assembly of the people, 
what is asked of them is not exactly whether they ap- 
prove of the proposition or whether they reject it, but 
whether or not it conforms to the general will, which 
is theirs; each one in giving his vote gives his opinion 
upon it, and from the counting of the votes is deduced 
the declaration of the general will. When, however, 
the opinion contrary to mine prevails, it shows only 
that I was mistaken, and what I had supposed to 
be the general will was not general. If my individual 
opinion had prevailed, I should have done something 
other than I had intended, and then I should not have 
been free. 1 

The Puritan doctrine, on the other hand, re- 
garded suffrage as a prerogative to be earned by 
a worthy character. "The saints should govern 
the earth/' said the Puritan ; and not all men 
were saints. In the early New England colonies, 
therefore, suffrage was conditioned on possession 
of property, possession of intelligence, paying of 
taxes, and, in some cases, on church membership. 
It is true that the disciples of neither school were 
always consistent. Political theories in practical 
application rarely are consistent. Thomas Jeffer- 
son advocated a restricted suffrage based on edu- 

1 J. J. Rousseau, The Social Contract, book iv, Chap. 2. 



THE TENDENCY OF DEMOCRACY 19 

cational and property qualifications. Henry Ward 
Beecher, the Puritan son of Puritan ancestors, 
advocated universal suffrage as a natural right, 
and would have it given to women, to the newly 
landed immigrant, and to the just emancipated 
negro. 

In this respect, curiously, the doctrine of uni- 
versal suffrage, as a natural right, has dominated 
the North, and limited suffrage now dominates 
the South. I believe that Massachusetts is the 
only New England state which requires educa- 
tional qualifications as a condition precedent to 
the vote. On the other hand, the South, suffer- 
ing during the Reconstruction period from the 
intolerable rule of an ignorant majority, led by 
unscrupulous self-seekers, has, with substantial 
unanimity, adopted the doctrine that suffrage is 
not a natural right, but an acquired prerogative, 
and should be given only to those who have 
proved themselves capable of exercising it for 
the benefit of the state. Even in the North, es- 
pecially in our great cities, there is an increasing 
tendency to question the practical wisdom or 
justice of universal suffrage. It is always difficult 
to take away political power when once it has 
been given ; but the recent adoption of the Aus- 
tralian ballot system, of careful registration, and 
of greater care in the naturalization of foreign- 



20 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

ers, has its secret cause in the recognized peril of 
unqualified suffrage. 

Up to a very recent date the doctrine that it 
is the duty of the State to provide education for 
all the people was practically unknown in most 
Latin countries. Education was regarded as a 
function of either the family or the Church, and 
to the family and the Church it was largely left. 
Even to-day in France the question whether the 
State or the Church shall educate the children 
of the Kepublic is probably the most bitterly con- 
tested question in that country. Half a century 
ago there was no public-school system in the 
southern half of this country, unless North Car- 
olina may be regarded as an exception, and even 
there the exception was rather theoretical than 
practical. To-day there is no state, territory, or 
possession of the United States in which there is 
not a more or less efficient public-school system. 
The Southern States, with a persistence, a hero- 
ism, and a self-sacrifice too little appreciated in 
the North, have established a system which aims 
to make equal provision for the children of all 
classes and both races, in a settled determination 
to give, so far as in them lies, despite no little 
unintelligent and prejudiced opposition, a fair 
opportunity for every child, poor or rich, black 
or white, to make the most he can of himself. 



THE TENDENCY OF DEMOCRACY 21 

Some readers of this chapter will remember 
with what combined invective and derision in 
1850 the country greeted W. H. Seward's de- 
claration that there is a higher law than the Con- 
stitution. The doctrine that government grows 
out of a compact and rests on the consent of the 
governed carried with it the doctrine that there 
could be no higher appeal than to the written 
Constitution which embodies that compact and 
expresses that consent. The era of Daniel Web- 
ster's statesmanship was dominated by that 
doctrine, and his appeal was habitually to the 
Constitution as the ultimate authority. The coun- 
try could go no higher. The temperance reform, 
the anti-slavery reform, the educational reform, so- 
cial and industrial reform, all combined to compel 
attention to other than merely constitutional 
considerations. To-day we ask, not, What is con- 
stitutional? but, What is right? If a policy is 
right, we seek by a liberal construction of the 
Constitution to find a way to secure it ; and if 
that is impossible, we begin to question, What 
amendment to the Constitution is required and is 
practical? In discussing the currency question, 
the temperance question, the colonial question, 
and the railway-rate-regulation question the peo- 
ple take but a languid interest in constitutional 
arguments. They are effective only in so far as 



22 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

they produce an impression that the law pro- 
posed may prove inoperative because the Su- 
preme Court may declare it unconstitutional. 
Our questions to-day are, Is the free silver or the 
gold standard right? Is prohibition or limited 
license right ? Is it right for us to govern a pro- 
vince which is not a part of self-governing Amer- 
ica? Is it right for the Congress to interfere 
with the regulation of the railways, or are they 
private property which justice requires should 
be left to private control ? In a word, if we 
do not yet ask, What are the laws of God? 
and if we are not content to take as an ultimate 
appeal, as the Puritans were, the interpretation 
of those laws as found in the Old Testament, 
still less are we content merely to ask what past 
compacts demand or present majorities desire. 
Political leaders and editorial writers outvie the 
pulpit in pressing upon their constituencies the 
question whether proposed policies and platforms 
are in harmony with those eternal laws of right 
and wrong which, whatever their basis, find their 
interpretation and their enforcement in the uni- 
versal conscience. 

Thus, during the last hundred years, in these 
four respects the country has been steadily 
moving away from the Latinized conception and 
toward the Puritan conception of law and lib- 



THE TENDENCY OF DEMOCRACY 23 

erty: away from government founded on the 
consent of the governed and toward government 
a divine organism ; away from universal suffrage 
toward limited suffrage ; away from leaving edu- 
cation to private enterprise toward treating edu- 
cation as a State function ; and away from political 
authority resting on the will of majorities to po- 
litical authority resting on eternal and immutable 
laws of right and wrong. 

Nor can I doubt that this movement has been 
in the right direction : that a social democracy with 
government founded on the moral law, and re- 
garded as a divine organism to be carried on co- 
operatively for the common benefit, is more truly 
and radically democratic than an individualistic 
democracy, with government founded on mutual 
consent, regarded as a necessary evil, confined in 
its functions to the protection of person and pro- 
perty, and leaving each individual to take care of 
his own individual interests regardless of his fel- 
lows, except as his political selfishness is modified 
by personal benevolence. 

So far I have treated democracy as purely polit- 
ical — that is, a form of government. But it is more 
than political ; more than a mere form of govern- 
ment. The spirit of democracy is the creation 
neither of France nor of England, of Latinism 
nor of Hebraism. Democracy is primarily the 



24 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

growth of humanity .V It is the emergence of man 
from a state of pupilage toward the state of 
manhood, with all his animal appetites and pas- 
sions, all his higher aspirations and desires, as yet 
neither understood nor controlled. It is the spirit 
of growth, of progress, of development. Demo- 
cracy is not merely a form of government ; it is 
not merely a phase of society ; it is a spirit of life. 
Democracy, therefore, does not merely have to do 
with the political organization. It is the reign of 
the common people in every department of life. 
It therefore revolutionizes every department of 
life : architecture, mechanics, invention, litera- 
ture, art, the home, the school, industry, govern- 
ment, religion. Latin democracy and Hebrew 
democracy are only the directions in which this 
movement of the common people is being di- 
rected. A brief glance at the course of the last 
hundred years will suffice to illustrate this truth ; 
a volume would be needed fully to interpret its 
various applications. 

Demos builds no temples equal to those of 
Greece, no cathedrals equal to those of mediaeval 
Christianity. When an attempt is made to build 
one, as in New York City or in the suburbs of 
Washington, there is a vague feeling that it is 
an anachronism, a building born out of due time. 
Demos builds pewed churches where the worshiper 



THE TENDENCY OF DEMOCRACY 25 

may sit at ease, measures the service by its ability 
to serve the worshiper, not by its fitness to please 
God, and puts emphasis on the sermon as a chief 
instrument of instruction and inspiration. Demos 
builds no palaces equal to those of ancient times. 
But he builds innumerable homes which offend 
the taste by barrenness of architectural ornament 
or vulgarity of ostentatious display, but which 
abound in comforts that the most luxurious lords 
of the Middle Ages or patricians of ancient Rome 
never knew. Demos owns no finer horses than the 
ancient landed proprietor, and has no such gilded 
coaches and liveried outriders. The principal sur- 
vival of the old coaching days is an occasional 
four-in-hand driven by an amateur and highly 
cultivated Tony Weller. But the roads are incom- 
parably better than those on which princes jolted 
and jostled when they drove at all, and the railway 
invented in the last century for the convenience 
of Demos covers in an hour more distance than his 
noble ancestors could have covered in a day. No 
modern artist in color surpasses a Titian, a Rem- 
brandt, a Frans Hals. But public picture galleries, 
unknown before the middle of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, give to the plainest and humblest of the people 
access to the noblest and rarest art. No wood-en- 
graving of to-day surpasses that of Albrecht Durer 
in beauty of design and perfection of execution j 



26 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

but photo-engraving, not yet half a century old, 
lays the work of the designer on every cottage table. 
For our present literature we go back to the crea- 
tive geniuses of the past; but the printing-press, 
which gives us in the morning daily the equivalent 
in amount of a moderate volume for a penny, also 
puts into one's hands for the price of a pot of 
beer or a cigar the great works of the great mas- 
ters. And the first public library, established in 
England in 1850, has been followed by such a pro- 
geny of children that in the United States there 
is scarcely to be found in any except the most 
sparsely settled States any town of moderate size 
without its library free to all the people. The 
public school puts the fundamentals of education 
within the reach of the great majority of the 
children of even the poorest and less educated ; 
and the half -million of pupils who crowd the high 
schools, which have been in existence but little 
over half a century, bear witness to the avidity 
with which the higher branches of education are 
sought by increasing numbers of boys and girls. 
In short, democracy means radical changes in 
all the material conditions of life, and in the 
nature and the spirit of life : in the means of in- 
tercommunication and transportation ; in the tools 
and implements of industry ; in the comforts of 
the homes; in the opportunities for self -develop- 



THE TENDENCY OF DEMOCRACY 27 

ment; in the fundamental conceptions of the aims 
and the uses of the institutions of religion. It 
means not merely government of the people, by 
the people, and for the people : it means, no less, 
wealth, industry, education, religion, — in a word, 
life, — for the people. That in this developing 
life we are to accept the guidance of the Hebrew- 
Puritan democracy rather than that of the Latin- 
French democracy, the theistic rather than the 
untheistic, the social rather than the individual, 
appears to me so axiomatic that it needs only to 
be clearly apprehended in order to be approved. 
At all events, I shall assume that we are tending, 
and that we ought to tend, in the direction of a 
social democracy ; and I shall try to indicate what 
light this guiding principle throws on the current 
questions of the Family, the School, Industry, 
and Politics. 



CHAPTER III 

THE PAGAN IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 

Mr. Zangwill has characterized America as a 
"Melting-Pot." Not merely various races, nation- 
alities, and religious sects are thrown into this 
melting-pot, but, no less, conflicting ideas and 
ideals. All creeds, traditions, theories, institutions, 
are brought into the laboratory by democracy to 
be analyzed. In this process, the more radical 
and revolutionary the reformer, the more sure he 
is of a hearing. Curiosity is agog, and the more 
novel the hypothesis, the more eager we are to 
know what it is. The experience of the past 
counts for little, partly because the modern re- 
former is often ignorant of the past, partly be- 
cause in his eager and impatient haste for change 
he regards the convictions of his ancestors as val- 
uable only because they show him what to avoid. 

The family is the oldest and the most sacred, 
as it is the most fundamental, of all social organ- 
isms, but the family is not exempt from this pro- 
cess of reinvestigation. There is no possible 
question about the family that is not asked, no 
possible change in the family that is not proposed. 

Ought the family to be one husband and one 



THE PAGAN IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 29 

wife, or one husband and several wives ? Poly- 
gamy is no longer a relic of ancient times. It 
has reappeared on American soil in an ecclesias- 
tical organization which absolutely dominates po- 
litically one State and holds the balance of power 
in at least one other State. Philosophers have 
sometimes excused polygamy as an economic ne- 
cessity in the earlier stages of society. Jesus ex- 
plained its permitted existence in the Hebraic 
Commonwealth as a concession to human passion. 
But Mormonism has glorified polygamy as a divine 
institution, has urged it upon women as a con- 
dition of future canonization, if not of future 
salvation. Whether the canonization or the sal- 
vation which several women get by marrying such 
a single husband as they usually get under such 
a system is worth the price it costs them is a 
doubtful question. If it be true that polygamy is 
decreasing, or has even absolutely ceased, the fact 
is due, not to a conversion from the Mormon faith, 
but to a concession to Gentile prejudice. I am not 
aware that polyandry, or the marriage of one 
woman to several husbands, has been seriously 
proposed in America. We are grateful to the 
reformers for that ; but I suspect that their re- 
serve is due to the fact that there are not men 
enough to go around. { 

What is the nature of the family ? Is it a di- 



30 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

vine organism ? or is it simply an economic and 
social partnership? Do this husband and wife 
come together to constitute the basic institution 
on which all society rests? or do they come 
together for industrial or social advantage? Is 
this marriage permanent or temporary ? Do they 
marry for " better or worse, for richer or poorer, 
in sickness and in health, till death us do part " ? 
or do they marry until the wife's fortune is run 
through, or the husband meets with bankruptcy, 
or until one or the other discovers faults in the 
mate before not suspected, or until one becomes 
an invalid and the other grows weary of the watch- 
ing, or until some complaisant and convenient 
court can be found to part these two, who do 
not need to wait for death ? These questions are 
not put by a satirist or a cynic ; they are the ques- 
tions that actually confront American society to- 
day. It has been well said by an American humorist 
that the difference between a Mormon and some 
other Americans is that the Mormon drives his 
wives abreast and the other drives them tandem. 
In the decade ending 1906, 600,593 divorces 
were granted in the United States of America. 
For convenience of arithmetical figuring, let us 
call them 600,000. This would be 60,000 a year. 
If we grant three hundred working days in the 
year, and I do not think any court in the United 



THE PAGAN IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 31 

States works as many days as that, the American 
courts have granted two hundred divorces a day; 
and if we allow eight working hours for the day, 
and I think few courts work more hours, the courts 
have granted twenty-five divorces every hour of 
every working day for the ten years ending in 
1906 ! Evidently marriage is not very permanent 
in America. 

In marriage what are the relations between hus- 
band and wife? Is she simply an upper servant 
or an agreeable toy ? That she is simply an upper 
servant would seem to be implied by one of the 
decisions of, I think, a California court, which 
divorced the husband from the wife because she 
had failed to sew on his shirt-buttons for him. Is 
she the money-spender and he the money-getter ? 
This would seem to be the idea of a woman whom 
I heard of in Europe last year. She met a friend, 
who asked, " Where is your daughter? " " I have 
put my daughter in a convent school, and I am 
going to travel." " But where is your husband?" 
" Somebody has got to stay at home and earn the 
money ! " 

Does marriage entail any duties upon the hus- 
band other than supporting the wife ? Does it 
entail any duties upon the wife other than living 
without unreasonable complaints on such support 
as the husband can provide for her ? Or should 



32 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

the wife be the wage-earner and the man be sup- 
ported by her? This theory is not infrequently 
exemplified in practice, but since no reformer 
ventures to defend it in theory, I do not here 
consider it. 

Finally, does parenthood entail any duty upon 
the parents ? Do the father and the mother owe 
any personal duty to the child whom they have 
brought into the world ? In considerable sections 
of American society such duty is ignored. By 
some reformers it is formally denied. Our indus- 
trial system is such that thousands of fathers, 
working ten or twelve hours a day, rarely see 
their children except in bed or on Sundays and 
holidays. A less number of mothers, compelled 
to eke out the inadequate subsistence earned by 
their husbands, leave their children in day nur- 
series while they maintain by their labor their 
overpraised economic independence. At the other 
end of the social scale are men and women who 
are prevented, not by their industry, but by their 
idleness, from giving any personal attention to 
their offspring. Such a mother, whose daughter 
was regularly late at school, apologized to the 
teacher by saying : " Of course I am never up at 
half-past eight, when my daughter should be 
starting from home, and one can never trust one's 
servants to be punctual." The reformer who pro- 



THE PAGAN IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 33 

poses that children should be turned over to ex- 
perts, that the mothers may be released from the 
cares of motherhood, only puts into words the 
method of parental dealing with children which 
mothers preceding her have put into practice. 

Finally, might it not be better to abolish mar- 
riage altogether, or have temporary and experi- 
mental marriages? One reformer has proposed 
the latter course. It is due to her, however, to 
say that she simply suggests that it would be 
better for the husband and wife to try the experi- 
ment for a year, and, if it failed, try again, than 
to be permanently married and to separate at the 
end of the year by means of a divorce decree. One 
so-called reformer urges the abolition practically of 
marriage altogether. G. Bernard Shaw writes : 
" What we must fight for is freedom to breed the 
race without being hampered by the mass of irrele- 
vant conditions implied in the institution of mar- 
riage. . . . What we need is freedom for people 
who have never seen each other and never intend 
to see each other again to produce children under 
certain definite public conditions without loss of 
honor." ! Recent investigation into the so-called 
white-slave traffic indicates that a state of condi- 
tions already exists in certain of our great cities 

1 Quoted by C. W. Saleeby, Parenthood and Race Culture^ 
p. 179. 



34 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

which does not differ materially from G. Bernard 
Shaw's ideal, and which, so far as known, has not 
contributed to the breeding of a noble, progres- 
sive, and promising race. It is true that G. Ber- 
nard Shaw is not to be taken seriously, because he 
does not take himself seriously. He likes to shock 
us, and I decline to be shocked. But the fact that 
he gives this message to the twentieth century, 
and the twentieth century listens to it, taken in 
connection with the serious conditions concern- 
ing marriage and divorce which I have already 
described, is not without significance. 

Such are some of the questions which we are 
to-day asking of ourselves in America concern- 
ing the family. Is the family founded on the 
marriage of one husband to one wife, or of one 
husband to many wives? If one husband to 
many wives, should he have them living together 
in one home, or should he have them in succes- 
sion, each one in turn departing to make room 
for her successor ? Is the family the social unit 
on which the organization of Church and State 
and industry depends, or is it a mere incident in 
a purely individualistic society ? Should marriage 
be permanent or transient, for life or for the 
mutual pleasure of the parties? Does the hus- 
band owe any duties to the wife ? Does the wife 
owe any duties to the husband? If so, what are 



THE PAGAN IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 35 

they ? Do they owe any duties to their children, 
or may they leave their children to be super- 
intended, nursed, educated, and trained vicari- 
ously for them by trained servants, by private 
benevolence, or by the State ? These questions 
are asked to-day in America, not only theoreti- 
cally by reformers, but practically by current so- 
cial customs. On these questions the experience 
of the past throws some light. What has that ex- 
perience to tell us ? 

At first the wife was the slave, or serf, of the 
husband. He sometimes had many wives ; but 
polygamy was always rare even in polygamous 
countries, because considerations of economy 
prevented general indulgence in polygamy. 
There are few men in Turkey or in Utah who are 
rich enough to maintain a household with a 
number of wives. But whether marriage was 
polygamous or monogamous, the wife was the 
serf of the household. There was no contract of 
marriage, no mutual assenting, no asking, " Wilt 
thou?" or "Wilt thou not?" The bride was 
captured in war or bought with a price. Even 
the courtship was founded on this conception of 
capture, for one ordinary method of courtship was 
for the woman to run as fast as she could, while 
the man ran after her until he overtook her. 
Having once entered into this relationship, she 



36 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

became absolutely her husband's property. He 
could sell her, he could give her away, he could 
lay any burdens upon her, impose on her any 
tasks, could chastise her at will. She was as 
much his servant as the slave whom he had 
bought in the market, as absolutely subject to 
his will as the child that had been born in his 
family. The marriage thus formed was largely 
a commercial employment. The wife was taken 
that she might perform drudgery and toil which 
the man was reluctant to perform ; or she was 
taken that she might bring to him children, who 
could be sold in the market if they were daugh- 
ters, or, if they were sons, used to bring by mar- 
riage other women into the household, and so in- 
crease the domestic service. 

Out of this grew a new experiment. If this 
commercial and industrial partnership had for its 
end the raising of children, and these children 
were an asset of the State, why should not the 
State undertake the work ? why should not the 
State supervise the marriage? why should not 
the State determine what man and what woman 
might marry, what children should be reared, 
and what children should be preserved? Plato 
proposed this. He suggested a community of 
wives and a community of children, with the 
added suggestion that they should be so brought 



THE PAGAN IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 37 

up that by no possibility should the child know 
its own mother. When I read Plato, I am always 
in doubt whether I am getting Plato or Socrates, 
and when I read the story of Xantippe I think 
possibly that the suggestion may have come from 
Socrates, who might well have wished that no 
husband should know his own wife. This theoret- 
ical suggestion of Plato was put in operation by 
Sparta. The industrial and economic organiza- 
tion which had been called the family was taken 
in charge by the State, was put under the super- 
vision and control of the State, and the children 
were taken from father and mother into the 
hands of the State. In order to make sure that 
the State did not enter upon a disadvantageous 
economic enterprise, the children were brought 
before triers, and if the child proved to be a 
feeble child, not likely to do the work of the 
State, it was promptly put to death. This plan 
did not, however, work as well for the State as 
the reformers had hoped it would, for the re- 
formers left out of life then, as reformers have 
often left out of life since, that which is the most 
potent force in all humanity — love. Because 
these Spartans had no homes, no families, no 
wives, no children, they soon lost their love for 
their country. Patriotism was throttled, and the 
State died. It is said of one of the great Spartan 



38 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

leaders, sent on an expedition against a foreign 
foe, that he betrayed his country, and sold it, in 
order that he might marry the daughter of the 
prince with whom he was battling, and so get a 
wife that belonged to him and not to the State. 

Marriage a condition of servitude, the wife a 
slave, her property, her person, her interests, her 
children, all under the absolute control of her 
master and her lord, became in time intolerable, 
and a reform was inaugurated. Marriage became 
a civil contract. The husband and the wife agreed 
to marry. And this civil contract lasted only so 
long as the agreement lasted. While husband and 
wife were satisfied, they remained husband and 
wife ; when they ceased to be satisfied, they dis- 
solved their bond and tried again. In the Roman 
Empire that plan was tried, though without the 
checks and limitations which we have put upon it, 
when to-day it has been put in practice in some 
of our States in the name, curiously enough, of 
woman's rights. On the whole, I am inclined to 
think that it was a reform ; that a marriage which 
is a contract is better than a marriage which is 
slavery, and a marriage dissoluble by the contract- 
ing parties is better than a marriage which puts 
the wife, her person, her property, everything she 
has or holds dear, in charge of one despotic au- 
thority. 



THE PAGAN IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 39 

However that may be, at the close of the eigh- 
teenth century the European states had, in their 
laws, adopted this pagan conception of marriage. 
It is true that this pagan conception had been 
ameliorated by human sentiment, and that some 
of the women had, despite it, developed noble 
characters, and were highly honored by the com- 
munity and by their households. It is also true 
that this pagan system was never recognized as 
true by the Christian Church, and was never ac- 
cepted as the whole truth by the people, who 
usually attempted to combine with this pagan con- 
ception the Christian ideal of which I shall speak 
in a succeeding chapter. But the twofold pagan 
conception of marriage, on the one hand as a 
civil contract, on the other as a servile subordina- 
tion of the woman to the man, was woven into 
the fabric of European laws. In Latin countries 
marriage before a civil officer was required. It 
might be followed by an ecclesiastical marriage, 
but the ecclesiastical marriage was not necessary 
in law. In England marriage might be performed 
by the priest, but need not be. It could also as 
well be performed by a civil officer. By this mar- 
riage the wife passed into the possession and power 
of her husband, though not quite so absolutely 
as she had done in the old paganism. But by 
marriage her legal existence was suspended, or at 



40 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

least incorporated and consolidated with that of her 
husband. All her property passed into his hands ; 
all her earnings belonged to him. Her children 
were legally his children and under his control. 1 
The only ameliorating circumstance that I recall 
was that, while her property passed into his hands, 
he was also liable for her debts reasonably con- 
tracted by a person in her condition. I am 
not quite sure whether under English law the 
man had a legal right to chastise his wife, but 
that he exercised that right very often in the 
lower classes English literature abundantly testi- 
fies. That supposed right has not been wholly 
disregarded even in America to-day. An acquaint- 
ance of mine recently congratulated a colored 
man in the South on his golden wedding. " Uncle/' 
he said, " I see you have lived fifty years with 
Aunt Dinah. " " Yes, sah! I have, sah! " replied 
the husband ; " and I have not had to hit her a 
lick once in all that fifty years ! " 

The conception that woman was made for man 
and was to be educated for man was wrought 
not only into the legal institutions of Europe but 
into its ideals. Rousseau was one of the radical 

1 "By marriage the husband and wife are one person in law; 
that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is sus- 
pended during marriage, or at least is incorporated and consoli- 
dated into that of her husband." — Blackstone, Commentaries. 
Quoted by Dicey, Law and Public Opinion in England. 



THE PAGAN IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 41 

reformers of his time, a recognized idealist of the 
close of the eighteenth century. It is interesting 
to read what he said about the object of woman 
in creation : — 

Women are specially made to please men. All their 
education should be relative to men. To please them, 
to be useful to them, to make themselves loved and 
honored by them, to bring them up when young, to 
take care of them when grown up, to counsel, to con- 
sole them, to make their lives agreeable and pleasant 
— these, in all ages, have been the duties of women, 
and it is for these duties they should be educated from 
infancy. 

Even in their religious beliefs the subordina- 
tion should be complete : — 

Even if this religion is false, the docility with which 
wife and daughter submit to the order of Nature 
effaces in the sight of God the sin of error. Being 
incapable of judging for themselves, they ought to ac- 
cept the decision of their fathers and their husbands 
like that of the Church. * 

This conception that woman was made for man, 
that in marriage she lost her personal identity and 
became merged and consolidated with the man, 
entered into and determined the popular ideal of 
woman's education. She was to be educated to be 

1 fimile, quoted by W. E. H. Lecky in Democracy and Liberty, 
vol. ii, p. 505. 



42 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

a wife and a mother, and this practically meant 
to be an upper servant of her husband and the 
nurse and governess of his children. The only 
education that was counted as proper for a woman 
was that which fitted her either to be a good house- 
keeper, on whom the care of the younger children 
devolved, or a parlor ornament creditable to her lord 
and master. She was to know how to cook, to do 
chamberwork, and to nurse the children, and she 
was to learn to do needlework, to play the piano, 
perhaps to draw and paint a little, and to be a good 
conversationalist. Charlotte Bronte gives an ac- 
count of the kind of education which woman re- 
ceived in the early part of the nineteenth century. 
It is thus illustrated in the prospectus of the school 
to which she was sent in her girlhood : — 

The terms for clothing, lodging, boarding, and edu- 
cating are £14 a year, half to be paid in advance when 
the pupils are sent; and also £1 entrance money for 
the use of books, etc. The system of education com- 
prehends history, geography, the use of globes, gram- 
mar, writing, and arithmetic, all kinds of needlework, 
and the nicer kinds of household work, such as getting 
up fine linen, etc. If accomplishments are required, 
an additional charge of <£3 a year is made for music 
or drawing, each. 1 

I have thus stated the questions which America 

1 E. C. Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Bronte, chap. 4. 



THE PAGAN IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 43 

is asking to-day respecting marriage and the fam- 
ily, and have stated, though very briefly, the an- 
swer which paganism gives to those questions. 
How far the answers which some of our modern 
reformers give are really derived from this ancient 
paganism I shall consider in the next chapter, 
which will be devoted to presenting, in contrast 
with the pagan ideal, that which we have derived 
from the Hebrew Scriptures. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE HEBREW IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 

The Hebrew ideal of the relationship between 
man and woman, and of marriage and the fam- 
ily, growing out of that relationship, is found 
chiefly in three passages : the first chapter of 
Genesis, the second chapter of Genesis, and 
the thirty-first chapter of Proverbs. 

In the first chapter of Genesis the writer de- 
clares that " God created man in his own image, 
in the image of God created he him ; male and 
female created he them " ; and that to them jointly 
he gave supremacy over the earth : " God said 
unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and re- 
plenish the earth, and subdue it; and have do- 
minion over the fish of the sea, and over the 
foul of the air, and over every living thing that 
moveth upon the earth." He is not represented 
as giving authority to one over the other, of 
making the one for the other, of creating the 
one in his image more than the other is created 
in his image. 

The image of God, the supremacy over na- 
ture, is not in any man : it is not in any woman ; 



THE HEBREW IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 45 

it is in humanity, the man and woman, neither 
of whom completes the image of God, neither of 
whom is sovereign on the earth. 

Both the American and the English poet have 
truly interpreted this Hebraic conception of the 
relationship of the sexes : — 

Nor equal, nor unequal ; each fulfills 

Defect in each, and always thought in thought, 

Purpose in purpose, will in will, they grow, 

The single pure and perfect animal, 

The two-celled heart beating with one full stroke, 

Life. 1 

As unto the bow the cord is, 

So unto the man is woman. 

Though she bends him, she obeys him ; 

Though she draws him, yet she follows : 

Useless each without the other. 2 

This is not the relationship of husband and 
wife. It is the relationship of man and woman. 
The two together make humanity. Man is not 
complete without the woman ; woman is not com- 
plete without the man. Woman is no more made 
for man than man is made for woman. Woman 
is no more to be educated for man than man is to 
be educated for woman. 

Nor do they duplicate each other. Their char- 
acteristics are not the same. Their function in 

1 Alfred Tennyson, The Princess. 

2 Henry W. Longfellow, Hiawatha. 



46 THE SPIRIT OP DEMOCRACY 

society is not the same. Their education ought 
not to be the same. Man is not a woman in trou- 
sers ; woman is not a man in petticoats. Neither 
is a model to be imitated by the other, neither 
is the standard by which the other is to be mea- 
sured. A masculine woman and a feminine man 
are equally abhorrent to nature ; they are ab- 
normal specimens of the race. This truth, that 
man and woman do not duplicate but do comple- 
ment each other, which Tennyson and Longfellow 
have put in poetry, Mr. Frederic Harrison has 
put in almost equally beautiful prose : — 

Who now wishes to propound the idle, silly question 
— which of the two is the superior type ? For our 
part, we refuse to answer a question so utterly un- 
meaning. Is the brain superior to the heart, is a great 
poet superior to a great philosopher, is air superior to 
water, or any other childish conundrum of the kind ? 
Affection is a stronger force in women's nature than 
in men's. Productive energy is a stronger force in 
men's nature than in women's. The one sex tends 
rather to compel, the other to influence ; the one acts 
more directly, the other more indirectly ; the mind of 
the one works in a more massive way, of the other in a 
more subtle and electric way. But to us it is the height 
of unreason and of presumption to say anything what- 
ever as to superiority on one side or on the other. All 
that we can say is that where we need especially pur- 
ity, unselfishness, versatility, and refinement, we look 



THE HEBREW IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 47 

to women chiefly; where we need force, endurance, 
equanimity, and justice chiefly, we look to men. 1 

The first chapter of Genesis gives the Hebrew 
conception of manhood and womanhood, the sec- 
ond chapter of Genesis the Hebrew conception 
of marriage. 

We have lost much out of our Bible by our 
unwise literalism, by insisting that there is no 
poetry, no fiction, no legend, that all is prosaic 
fact; that only Gradgrind could have written 
the Bible and only Gradgrind can interpret it. 
Let us read this second chapter of Genesis as we 
should read it if we found it in any other liter- 
ature than the literature of the Hebrew people. 

Man is in a garden, in the days of innocence, 
before sin, before temptation, before society 
exists, before cities are built or work is begun. 
He is lonely, this man in this garden, and the 
good God brings to him one animal after another 
for companionship. He is to christen and to 
name them. The horse comes saying : " I will 
bear your burdens." — " Will you bear my sor- 
rows with me?" — " No ! I cannot do that." 
The dog comes : "I will watch by your side." — 
" If I am sick, will you nurse me back into life ? " 

1 Frederic Harrison, Realities and Ideals, p. 91. In some de- 
tails I should put the contrast differently. Thus, I think, in a 
certain type of endurance woman is superior to man. 



48 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

— "No ! I cannot do that." The cat comes: "I 
will lie in your lap, and you shall caress me." — 
" And will you caress me in turn ? " — " No ! I 
cannot do that." The bird comes : " I will sing 
sweet songs to you." — "Will you rejoice with 
me ? " _ " No ! I cannot do that." 

The man turns from the animals whom he has 
christened and says to his Father : " None of 
these is a companion to me " ; and the good God 
says : " No, for you are not yet finished. You 
are only half made ; you are only half a man ; 
you have only half a life. Wait ! See ! Out of 
your very side I will take her who shall be your 
comrade. She shall bear your sorrows with you, 
and you shall bear hers. She shall give you 
strength to carry your burdens, and you shall 
carry hers. She shall watch by you in time of your 
sickness, and you shall watch by her. She shall 
sing softly and sweetly to you, and your heart 
shall feel the thrill of the heart that is like your 
own." And from that opening chapter all through 
this collection of sacred literature there is no hint 
of servitude or separation save as they appear as 
the outgrowth of selfishness and sin. The two 
are one in their creation, co-equal comrades. 
The two are one in their life, co-equal mates. 

The third Hebrew ideal is contained in the 
thirty-first chapter of Proverbs : — 



THE HEBREW IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 49 

A worthy woman who can find ? 

For her price is far above rubies. 

The heart of her husband trusteth in her, 

And he shall have no lack of gain. 

She doeth him good and not evil 

All the days of her life. 

She seeketh wool and flax, 

And worketh willingly with her hands. 

She is like the merchant-ships ; 

She bringeth her bread from afar. 

She riseth also while it is yet night, 

And giveth food to her household, 

And their task to her maidens. 

She considereth a field, and buyeth it : 

With the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard. 

She girdeth her loins with strength, 

And maketh strong her arms. 

She perceiveth that her merchandise is profitable : 

Her lamp goeth not out by night. 

She layeth her hands to the distaff, 

And her hands hold the spindle. 

She stretcheth out her hand to the poor ; 

Yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy. 

She is not afraid of the snow for her household ; 

For all her household are clothed with scarlet. 

She maketh for herself carpets of tapestry ; 

Her clothing is fine linen and purple. 

I venture to say that not in pagan literature, 
not in the ethics of Confucius, not in the Vedic 
hymns, not in the poetry of Greece or Rome, not 



50 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

in legend or story of Scandinavian tribes, is to be 
found such a picture of the dignity and glory and 
honorable service of woman. 

She is no toy and no dependent idler. She has 
her work to do, and glories in it. She counts no 
honorable industry servile, works willingly with 
her hands. She is no narrow-minded provincial. 
Her vision stretches out over other lands. She 
knows what the world is doing, has some share 
in it; is like the merchant ships, and brings food 
both for mind and body from afar. She is not 
cottoned or cozened in the bed of idleness, but 
rises betimes for her work ; never counts execu- 
tive ability unwomanly ; is a wise and efficient 
mistress of maidens. She has no notion that in- 
validism is interesting, that to be attractive she 
must be pale and bloodless. She girdeth her loins 
with strength, and her arms are strong. Her 
charity begins at home, but does not end there. 
Her sympathies reach out beyond her husband and 
her children. She is a wise almoner of charity, and 
not through contribution-boxes and charitable or- 
ganizations only. She does not shun contact with 
the lowly and the unfortunate. She stretches out 
her hand to the poor and the needy. She has not 
the notion that simplicity and ugliness are synony- 
mous, that beauty in dress and furniture is sinful. 
She is not blind to the lessons of nature, which 



THE HEBREW IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 51 

clothes this world in a great glory of form and color. 
Her household are clothed with scarlet, and her own 
clothing is fine linen and purple. She takes thought 
for the morrow, and therefore does not take anx- 
iety for it. Because she is forethoughted she can 
laugh at the time to come. She does not con- 
found innocence and ignorance, does not think 
it unwomanly to be well educated ; she openeth 
her mouth with wisdom. Nor does she think to 
show her wisdom by the sharpness of her tongue. 
Nor is she a gossip-monger. In her tongue is the 
law of kindness. Her personal ambitions run not 
beyond her household. She has no longing for 
public place and public service. She seeks her 
coronation within the walls of her home, happy 
if her children rise up and call her blessed, and 
her husband praises her. 

This ideal of creation, of marriage, of woman- 
hood, derived from the Hebrew people, passed 
over into Europe together with the pagan ideal 
derived from Imperial Rome. Wherever pagan- 
ism dominated, woman was dishonored and mar- 
riage was reduced to a commercial partnership. 
Wherever Christianity dominated, woman was 
glorified and marriage was treated as a sacrament. 
The Church honored woman. It put by the side 
of the Lord himself the Virgin Mother who bore 
him. The adoration of the Virgin was one of the 



52 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

messages of the Catholic Church. Wherever that 
adoration was offered, wherever that mother and 
child were painted, wherever the Ave Maria was 
played or sung, there womanhood and mother- 
hood were exalted and adored. With this ideal of 
womanhood there went an ideal of marriage as 
a sacred sacrament binding husband and wife to- 
gether in an indissoluble bond. And wherever 
these two went, there went also the idea of com- 
plete comradeship ; for these three Hebrew ideals 
are really one in three, a sacred trinity of love : 
man and woman created one; man and woman 
created to be comrades ; and man and woman 
united by marriage in an indissoluble bond. 

For it is not merely the husbands that are to 
be comrades. The comradeship may be between 
husband and wife, or between brother and sister, 
or between father and daughter, or between friend 
and friend. It is man and woman who are made 
in the image of God ; it is man and woman who 
are united in a sacred fellowship. There is no 
space here in which adequately to illustrate this 
comradeship which the Hebrew ideal puts before 
us. Life is the best interpreter of the Bible. From 
the book of life I select one single picture of this 
comradeship between brother and sister. Much 
has been made of what Charles Lamb did for 
Mary Lamb, and we have sometimes wondered 



THE HEBREW IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 53 

at the patience of the brother in bearing with his 
ofttimes crazy sister. It came to me somewhat as 
a surprise when a friend called my attention to 
Charles Lamb's testimony of what that sister had 
been to him : — 

I have every reason to suppose that this illness, 
like all the former ones, will be but temporary, but I 
cannot feel it so. Meanwhile she is dead to me, and I 
miss a prop. All my strength is gone, and I am like a 
fool, bereft of her co-operation. I dare not think lest 
I should think wrong, so used am I to look up to her in 
the least as in the biggest perplexity. To say all that 
I know of her would be more than I think anybody 
could believe or even understand ; and when I hope 
to have her well again with me, it would be sinning 
against her feelings to go about to praise her, for I 
can conceal nothing I do from her. She is older, wiser, 
better than I, and all my wretched imperfections I 
cover to myself, by resolutely thinking on her good- 
ness. She would share life, death, heaven and hell 
with me. She lives but for me. I know I have been 
wasting and teasing her life for five years incessantly 
with my cursed drinking and ways of going on. But 
even in this upbraiding of myself I am offending 
against her, for I know that she has clung to me for 
better, for worse ; and if the balance has been against 
her hitherto, it was a noble trade. 1 

1 Letter written to Dorothy Wordsworth by Charles Lamb 
when Mary Lamb was in the asylum, during one of her attacks 
of insanity, June 14, 1805. Letters of Charles Lamb, edited by E. 
V. Lucas; letter 133. 



54 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

Many a brother, many a father, many a hus- 
band who has not the pen of Charles Lamb has 
had his experience, and bears silent witness to the 
service which has been rendered to him by the 
inspiring presence of a sister, a daughter, or a 
wife. 

Thus in the beginning of the nineteenth cen- 
tury there were in Europe these two contrasted 
streams of influence, one coming from paganism 
through Imperial Rome, the other coming from 
the Hebrew race through the Christian Church. 
Both were imported into America, the pagan idea 
from deistical Prance, the Christian idea from 
Puritan England. Rousseau's interpretation of 
the pagan ideal I quoted in the preceding chap- 
ter. J. R. Green has well interpreted the Puritan 
ideal : — 

Home, as we conceive it now, was the creation of 
the Puritan. Wife and child rose from mere depend- 
ents on the will of husband or father, as husband and 
father saw in them saints like himself, souls hallowed 
by the touch of a divine Spirit and called with a di- 
vine calling like his own. The sense of spiritual fel- 
lowship gave a new tenderness and refinement to the 
common family affections. " He was as kind a father," 
says a Puritan wife of her husband, " as dear a brother, 
as good a master, as faithful a friend as the world 
had." The willful and lawless passion of the Renas- 
cence made way for a manly purity. Neither in youth 



THE HEBREW IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 55 

nor riper years could the most fair or enticing woman 
draw him into unnecessary familiarity or dalliance. 
Wise and virtuous women he loved, and delighted in 
all pure and holy and unblamable conversation with 
them, but so as never to excite scandal nor temptation. 1 

It is to this Hebraic, Christian, Puritan influ- 
ence we owe the modern idea o£ woman's educa- 
tion ; that she is to be educated, not as Rousseau 
had said, to make the lives of men agreeable and 
pleasant, but for God and for herself. In 1819 
Miss Willard opened what I believe was the first 
school for the really higher education of women 
in this i country. In 1837 Mount Holyoke fol- 
lowed under Mary Lyon. In 1861 Vassar College 
was founded ; then, following, Smith and Welles- 
ley and Bryn Mawr. 2 All these were in the con- 
ception and ideal of their founders distinctly 
Christian institutions. Meanwhile Western col- 
leges were opening their doors to women, and 
secondary schools for girls enlarged their curri- 
cula and raised their standards, until to-day, after 
a century of education, it may fairly be said that 
educational facilities for woman in this country 
are, considering the length of time they have 
been established, approximately as good as the 

1 J. R. Green, History of England, vol. iii, p. 19. 
3 This of course does not aim to be a complete list of colleges 
and collegiate institutions. 



56 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

educational facilities for man. The same methods 
of study are open to her as to her brother in the 
preparatory schools. She is admitted to the same 
high schools, and to a large extent the same 
higher education is furnished to both in the col- 
leges. 

The new education has changed the old pagan- 
ism, but has not converted it. The struggle be- 
tween the pagan and the Christian conceptions 
of woman, marriage, and the family continues on 
our soil, though in a new form. Paganism no 
longer affirms that woman was made for man, or 
that she is to be educated to make life agreeable 
and pleasant for him, and that she is to be his 
servant or his toy. But loud voices are calling 
on her to become his competitor ; to join in the 
struggle of life, not with him, but against him. 
A little child of my acquaintance, who had heard, 
more intelligently than any one had imagined, 
the woman question discussed in the family circle, 
asked his governess one day when they were 
gathering wild flowers, whether she preferred 
Dutchman's breeches or ladies' slippers. That is 
the Woman Question in a sentence. Does she 
wish to be a woman or a modified man? 

The new paganism assures woman that the 
difference of sex is but an incident in life ; that, 
with the same education as man, she has become 



THE HEBREW IDEAL OF THE FAMILY 57 

or is becoming the same kind of being, en- 
dowed with the same characteristics, called to the 
same service, intended to fulfill the same social 
function ; that there is no more difference between 
man and woman than there is between individuals 
in either sex ; that she is to be not man's comple- 
ment but his duplicate, not his comrade but his 
competitor, in the market-place, the factory, the 
court-room, and on the hustings ; that as man is, 
woman is — his toil her toil, his task her task, his 
place her place ; that marriage is only a partner- 
ship between the two, to be continued while it 
proves mutually agreeable; that children are a 
painful inconvenience, to be avoided if possible, 
and, when inevitable, discarded as soon as may 
be. This is what pagan democracy demands of 
woman and for woman. 

Hebraic, Puritan, Christian democracy, in its 
interpretation of life and in its demands both on 
woman and for woman, is the antithesis of the 
modern paganism. There is no accident of sex, 
Man and woman are not cast in the same mould, 
created for the same function, or called to the 
same service. They are created to be comrades, 
not competitors ; for cooperation, not for rivalry. 
She is not made for him more than he is made for 
her; she is not to be educated for him more than 
he is to be educated for her. They are made for 



58 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

each other. Marriage is not a partnership ; it is 
not a civil contract ; it is a divine order ; indis- 
soluble save for the one disloyalty which does by 
necessity destroy the family. The home is the 
basic organization on which both Church and State 
are founded, for which both Church and State 
exist. The rearing and training of children is 
the end of life, which alone gives it significance. 
To protect from enemies while this work of rear- 
ing and training children is carried on is the func- 
tion of government. To provide food and shel- 
ter for the family while this rearing and training 
of children is carried on is the function of the 
material industries. To supplement the family in 
this rearing and training of children is the func- 
tion of the school and the Church. In this work 
of rearing and training children woman is supreme, 
made so by her divine equipment, and in it pro- 
tected and provided by her mate. Neither master 
and servant nor competitors and rivals, but com- 
rades, neither independent of the other, neither 
complete without the other, each made for the 
other, are man and woman in the world's great 
work, which is the creation of children of God. 



CHAPTER V 

THE EVOLUTION OF EDUCATION 

There are two conceptions of education put in 
sharp contrast by two interesting fables, similar 
in form, contrasted in the lessons which they 
teach — the fable of the colts, by Pestalozzi ; the 
fable of the dogs, by Rousseau. 

The Two Colts. Two colts as like as two eggs fell 
into different hands. One was bought by a peasant 
whose only thought was to harness it to his plough as 
soon as possible ; this one turned out a bad horse. The 
other fell to the lot of a man who by looking after it 
well and training it carefully made a noble steed of 
it, strong and mettlesome. Fathers and mothers, if 
your children's faculties are not carefully trained and 
directed right, they will become not only useless, but 
hurtful ; and the greater the faculties, the greater the 
danger. 

The Two Dogs. Just look at those two dogs ; they 
are of the same litter, they have been brought up and 
treated precisely alike, they have never been sepa- 
rated ; and yet one of them is sharp, lively, affection- 
ate, and very intelligent ; the other is dull, lumpish, 
surly, and nobody could ever teach him anything. 
Simply a difference of temperament has produced in 



60 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

them a difference of character, just as a simple differ- 
ence of our interior organization produces in us a 
difference of mind. 

To Pestalozzi the mind of a child is like the 
plastic clay which the teacher fashions ; to Rous- 
seau, like the stone image, the teacher can only 
polish it a little. To Pestalozzi education is the 
whole process of human development ; to Rous- 
seau Nature is the mother of us all, and the less 
we interfere with her processes the better. Pesta- 
lozzi would have education begin at the cradle ; 
Rousseau would have what education there is 
begin at twelve years of age. 

I hold with Pestalozzi that education fashions 
and shapes the growing child ; it cannot begin too 
soon. Education is simply directed growth, and 
the education should begin when the growth be- 
gins. The mind of a child is like a garden bed. 
There are in it seeds of flowers and seeds of weeds. 
The teacher cannot change the weeds to flowers, 
but the teacher can eradicate the weeds and de- 
velop the flowers. This is education. The teacher 
puts the child on a path and knows not where it 
will lead ; only this, that the path leads up into 
the clouds or down into a dark and bottomless 
abyss. 

The weakest of all animals is the infant, know- 
ing nothing, able to do nothing, absolutely de- 



THE EVOLUTION OF EDUCATION 61 

pendent for his very existence on the nursing 
mother. At the other extreme of life, developed 
by the processes of a life education, stands Glad- 
stone shaping the nation's destinies, or Browning 
singing songs the ages will listen to, or Edison 
gathering the lightning and making it light our 
houses and run our trolley-cars. The difference 
between this little, insignificant, useless creature 
in the cradle and this great statesman, this great 
poet, this great inventor, is education. 

There seems to me nothing so great as this 
work of a teacher, whether we call this teacher 
mother, or father, or instructor, or pastor. To 
take a character and mould and make it what 
the builder will — there is nothing greater than 
that. It is a great thing to paint a wonderful 
portrait that, when she whom I loved is gone, 
will speak to me with eloquent lips and look at 
me with gleaming eyes ; but it is a greater thing 
to make the character of which that is but a 
portrait. It is a great thing to be a poet and por- 
tray with burning words a living citizen ; but it 
is a greater thing to create the living citizen. It 
is a great thing to be a great statesman, holding 
the helm of state and guiding it on its perplexed 
course ; but it is a greater thing to make the 
statesman, and the nation which he is guiding. 
Says Erasmus : — 



62 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

Would it not be a horror to look upon a human 
soul clad in the form of a beast, as Circe is fabled to 
have done by her spells ? But is it not worse that a 
father should see his own image slowly but surely 
becoming the dwelling-place of a brute's nature? 
It is said a bear's cub is at birth but an ill-formed 
lump, which by a long process of licking is brought 
into shape. Nature, in giving you a son, presents 
you, let us say, a rude, unformed creature, which 
it is your part to fashion so that it may become in- 
deed a man. If this fashioning be neglected, you have 
but an animal still ; if it be contrived earnestly and 
wisely, you have, I had almost said, what may prove 
a being not far from a God. 

If it is a great work for mothers to do this for 
a few children, or teachers to do this for a few 
more children, what a wonderful work it is for a 
nation to do this for itself ! 

And that is what the American nation is 
doing. We are not only a self-governing people : 
we are what is far more important, a self-educat- 
ing people. We are dependent for our education, 
not upon a few learned or a few wise men, save 
as we select the learned and the wise : we are de- 
pendent on ourselves. We fashion our schools, 
build our schoolhouses, select our curriculum, 
determine our educative processes. A nation of 
eighty millions of people is educating itself. 
What kind of education are we giving ourselves ? 



THE EVOLUTION OF EDUCATION 63 

What is the result of our self-development ? An 
orator, boasting of his abilities in a public speech, 
said, u Fellow-citizens, I am glad to say I am a 
self-made man." An auditor in the distance 
called out, " You have taken off your Creator a 
very heavy responsibility." We are a self-made 
nation. What kind of a nation are we making? 

How came we to enter on this so audacious 
experiment? To answer that question, we must 
trace rapidly, and far too briefly, the history of 
the growth of education. 

Professor Dicey says that not until 1832 did 
England recognize any national responsibility for 
education, or even impose any legal obligation 
upon parents to educate their own children. 
1832 ! This progressive Anglo-Saxon race, to 
which many of us are proud to belong, is, then, 
from twenty -five hundred to three thousand 
years behind the Hebrew race; for the Hebrew 
Commonwealth enacted, somewhere between six 
hundred and a thousand years before Christ 
(scholars differ as to the date, and it is not neces- 
sary to discuss the question here), a law which 
required parents to teach their children. Whether 
that law was enforced by legal penalties I do not 
know, but it was law ; and that law further pro- 
vided for certain great gatherings from time to 
time, like our camp-meetings or our Chautauqua 



64 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

assemblies, to which the professional teachers of 
the nation should come, and from platforms and 
pulpits should teach the men and women and chil- 
dren. For woman's education does not date from 
the beginning of the nineteenth century, but from 
a thousand years before Christ. And the law, a 
little later, provided for itinerant teachers who 
should go from village to village, teaching the 
people by a kind of itinerant school-mastership. 
Out of this primitive system of education, — 
very primitive it certainly was, but adapted to a 
primitive condition, — there had grown by the 
time of Christ a Jewish system under which there 
was a synagogue school connected with every 
synagogue, and a university of considerable pro- 
portions connected with the great Temple at Je- 
rusalem. It was to that university at the Temple 
at Jerusalem that Jesus was drawn when he was 
a boy only twelve years of age, not to teach the 
doctors, but to learn from the rabbis what he 
could not learn from the less instructed rabbi of 
the synagogue in his village home. Up to this 
time there had been nowhere else in the world, 
except possibly China, any system of education 
provided by either State or Church. There were 
schools in Greece and later in Rome, and the 
philosophers of Greece and Rome urged on par- 
ents the duty of education ; and there were well- 



THE EVOLUTION OF EDUCATION 65 

educated men in Greece and in Rome. But the 
State as a state — with the possible exception of 
Sparta for a few short years — and the pagan 
Church as a church made no provision for popu- 
lar education. The schools were subsidiary to the 
home; they were aids to the parents. If the 
parents had the inclination and the means, they 
sent their children to school or had teachers to 
teach them at home ; if the parents lacked either 
the inclination or the means, the children were 
left to grow up untaught; and, in point of fact, 
in ancient Rome the great majority of the chil- 
dren were so left to grow up untaught. 

The Hebrew religion, transformed, developed, 
— to use Jesus' own words, fulfilled, — passed 
over into Europe, and carried with it the syna- 
gogue school, transformed into a Christian 
school. It is difficult for us to state exactly what 
happened in the first two or three centuries of 
the Christian era ; history, if not absolutely silent, 
speaks in ambiguous terms. But we know that 
at the close of the third century there were 
Christian schools connected with most of the 
Christian churches. By the sixth century a de- 
cree issued by one of the great Councils called 
upon the Church to establish such schools in 
connection with every church ; and from the 
sixth century down to the sixteenth there f ol- 



66 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

lowed decree after decree and edict after edict 
— from synod, from council, and from popes — 
urging on the Church the duty of providing ed- 
ucation for the people by the establishment of 
parochial schools for the primary work, and of 
cathedral schools for the higher work. The great 
universities of to-day are the children of these 
early Church schools. Cambridge and Oxford, 
for example, are the outgrowth of schools in the 
same places, and to a considerable extent in the 
same buildings, originally established and main- 
tained by the Roman Catholic Church. 

At the beginning of the sixteenth century was 
born the great democratic movement. It had two 
aspects: the Renaissance, with its home in Italy; 
the Reformation, with its home in Germany. 
And with this birth of the democratic spirit there 
came a new conception of education. This was 
partly a new conception of its breadth and ex- 
tent, but it was largely a new conception of the 
instrument by which it should be carried on. 
Both Erasmus, the prophet of the Renaissance, 
and Luther, the prophet of the Reformation, 
insisted upon schools organized, supported, and 
governed by the State. They were not satisfied 
to leave education in the hands of the parents or 
in the hands of the Church ; they demanded that 
the State should undertake the work of popular 



THE EVOLUTION OF EDUCATION 67 

education; that it should become a national ob- 
ligation. It is interesting to find in the writings 
of Erasmus on education the same objections re- 
ported which are repeated to-day in the twentieth 
century, met by the same arguments by which 
they are met to-day. 

You say [says Erasmus] that you have no time to 
educate your children. If you will give up some of 
your foolish pleasures, if you will give up some of 
your useless avocations, and especially if you will de- 
vote less time to your senseless social functions, you 
will have time enough to educate your children. You 
have no money. No money ! Why, you pay less for 
your teachers than you pay for your cook. [I believe 
that is still sometimes true in New York City.] You 
mothers are more particular to dress your children 
than to educate them. You are anxious for their hats 
and their dresses that they should appear well. If you 
must gratify your vanity by dressing somebody, buy a 
monkey and dress him. You say that education im- 
pairs the health. I should certainly always advise 
moderation in the amount of mental exertion de- 
manded, but I have little patience with critics who 
only become anxious about the youthful constitution 
when education is mooted, but who are indifferent to 
the far more certain risks of overfeeding, late hours, 
and unsuitable dressing in the classes about whom I 
am here concerned. 1 

1 W. H. Woodward, Erasmus Concerning Education. I here 
summarize, not quoting with verbal accuracy. 



68 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

That would not be a bad lesson in some homes 
in America. Erasmus laid stress on the taking up 
of education by the State. He was more radical 
than the most radical of advocates of State edu- 
cation to-day. Secular education, or none at all, 
was his cry. Luther spoke on this subject with 
even greater f orcef ulness : — 

Since we are all required, and especially the magis- 
trates, above all other things to educate the youth who 
are born and are growing up among us, and to train 
them up in the way of virtue, it is needful that we 
have schools, preachers, and pastors. If the parents 
will not reform, they must go their way to ruin ; but 
if the young are neglected and left without education, 
it is the fault of the State, and the effect will be that 
the country will swarm with vile and lawless people, 
so that our safety, no less than the command of God, 
requireth us to see and ward off this evil. [He main- 
tains in this letter that government] as the natural 
guardian of the young has a right to compel the peo- 
ple to support the schools. What is necessary to the 
well-being of a state, that should be supplied by those 
who enjoy the privileges of such state. 1 

Since the sixteenth century the public school, 
that is, the school supported and maintained by, 
and under the government of, the political organ- 
ization, has been the constant companion and the 

1 Letter of Martin Luther to the Elector of Saxony, quoted 
in Barnard's German Pedagogy, p. 13. 



THE EVOLUTION OF EDUCATION 69 

true foundation of every democratic state. The 
public schools of Germany date from the days 
of Luther. Their excellence is due in part to the 
fact that they have been under a process of har- 
monious development for more than three centu- 
ries. The public schools passed gradually over 
into other countries, which gradually became demo- 
cratic. It was not until 1870 that the State made 
any provision for public education in England. 
It was not until 1881 that the State undertook 
compulsory education in France. 

The Puritans brought their system of public 
education with them as the foundation of their 
theocracy. It extended, after the Civil War, into 
the South, and has now gone wherever the Amer- 
ican flag has gone. One of the most inspiring 
surprises which the visitor to Porto Rico sees to- 
day as he travels over that island is the rural 
schoolhouse in every village, and oftentimes in 
spots remote from any town. In Porto Rico, 1 in 
Hawaii, in the Philippines, the public school — 
that is, the school supported and carried on and 
maintained by the State — has followed, accom- 
panied, been the foundation of, the democratic 

1 The latest statistics available at this writing show in Porto 
Kico : schools, 2,040 ; scholars, 87,236 ; teachers, 1,736. And 
when our troops landed in Porto Rico, there were no schools 
outside a few of the larger towns, and not a school building in 
the island which had been erected for that purpose. 



70 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

movement. I sat one night recently by the side 
of Baron Kikuchi, the head of the Educational 
Department of Japan, and he told me that in that 
country ninety-eight per cent of the children were 
in the public school. I said to him, " You are in 
advance of America." I wonder how long it will 
be before we catch up. 

Thus there have developed from very primitive 
beginnings three instruments of education, — the 
Home, the Church, and the State. How the edu- 
cation should be divided between these three is 
a matter of hot debate. In France the govern- 
ment has recently prohibited the Church from 
doing any teaching. In Germany the State does 
the teaching, but in some parts of the Empire 
the Church comes in after hours to add religious 
instruction. In England the Church and State 
combine to render instruction, the Church carry- 
ing on some schools, the State others. In Amer- 
ica the State carries on the schools, but the Church 
is perfectly free to establish and maintain schools 
by its own action and under its own direction, if 
it sees fit to do so. 

I jbelieve that these three organizations, the 
Home, the Church, and the School, should com- 
bine in education. How they should combine, 
and what education they should furnish, I shall 
consider in a succeeding chapter. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE HOME, THE CHURCH, THE SCHOOL 

Education begins at the cradle. The first edu- 
cator is the mother. The first lesson to be taught 
is obedience. This is the first lesson which must 
be learned by a self-governing member of a self- 
governing community. 

We are born into a world of law. We cannot 
do as we please. We are not at liberty, if liberty 
means exemption from law. If a man thinks he 
has liberty to fly, and jumps off the roof of the 
house, he finds when he reaches the sidewalk 
that he has not even liberty to walk, unless first 
he has learned the laws of aerial navigation and 
flies in accordance with them. Obedience to law 
is the foundation of all civilization, material, in- 
tellectual, social, spiritual. The first thing the 
child has to learn is that there are other wills su- 
perior to his will, and laws to which he must him- 
self be obedient. An indulgent mother is a cruel 
mother. She is sending out her child unprepared 
for the restraints of law, which will be enforced 
by seemingly cruel penalties. If she were wise 
and strong, she would temper law to the child's 



72 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

capacity. We try to put up a gate at Ellis Is- 
land to keep the Anarchists out ; we ought to 
put it up in our nurseries. There our children 
are being taught lawlessness ; taught that they 
may obey or not obey, as they will ; there laws 
are given to them, and then, when disobeyed, 
left unenforced. The babe in the cradle readily 
understands whether or not he must obey. The 
sooner he learns that he must, the sooner he is 
fitted for a self-governing member of a self- 
governing community, the sooner he is fitted for 
a happy life in the world. 

It is not enough, however, that he obeys laws 
that are interpreted to him by father or mother ; 
if he is to be a self-governing member of a self- 
governing community, he must learn how to 
understand laws that are not written and not in- 
terpreted ; he must know how to read the invisi- 
ble laws written in the human constitution, and 
yield them, not a reluctant obedience because 
they are enforced, but a glad and willing obedi- 
ence because he recognizes their value. What 
are the bonds which bind Democracy together? 
Not armies, or navies, or policemen. There are 
two bonds: truth and justice. Truth gives us 
mutual confidence in one another in the inter- 
communication of ideas; justice gives us mutual 
confidence in one another in the actual transac- 



THE HOME, THE CHURCH, THE SCHOOL 73 

tions of life. Take out either and the community 
drops to pieces. These are the invisible hoops 
that hold the barrel together. 

Any kind of a person, says E. S. Martin, will 
do for a parent — except a liar. I am afraid that 
is a large exception. I do not think I am a pes- 
simist ; but I do verily believe that more lies are 
told by mothers, fathers, and nurses to children 
than all the rest of the lies put together. We lie 
to them with false threats ; we lie to them with 
false promises ; we lie to them with false stories ; 
we teach them by our practice that a child has 
not a right to truth ; and then we wonder that 
they learn the lesson. Nor do I think that 
mothers are generally very good in teaching jus- 
tice. They teach kindness, gentleness, considera- 
tion, generosity — but not justice. Among the 
first lessons our children ought to learn in the 
home are the elemental rights of property and 
rights of person. Every child is born a robber. 
Put two babies on the floor, and give one of 
them a rattle, and see the other crawl to his com- 
panion, and, if he is strong enough, wrest the 
rattle away from his companion. He is a high- 
way robber. It is not his fault ; he has not yet 
learned the rights of property. The little child 
will romance, and be rebuked for falsehood. He 
has not learned the difference between falsehood 



74 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

and fiction, and it is to be taught him. He does 
not know the difference between a fairy tale and 
a lie. The difference is so subtle that even grown 
folks do not seem always to understand it. Truth 
and justice — these are to be taught in the nur- 
sery before the child has gone out to the larger 
life of the schools. 

Taught? Yes! but teaching is not enough; 
trained. There are many people, I think, who 
imagine that the Bible says, " Govern a child in 
the way he should go, and when he is old he will 
not depart from it " ; and they do govern a child 
in the way he should go, and as soon as he es- 
capes from the authority he does depart from it. 
What the Bible says is, " Train up a child in the 
way he should go," and neither governing nor 
teaching is the same as training. Training is the 
production of habit. Actions oft repeated be- 
come a habit; habit long continued becomes a 
second nature. When you have trained your 
child in habits of justice and of truth, when you 
have formed in him the habit of telling the truth 
and the habit of acting justly, he will not depart 
from them, because he cannot depart from him- 
self. 

The father and the mother have opportunities 
of training that the teacher does not have, if the 
father and mother are willing to take the time 



THE HOME, THE CHURCH, THE SCHOOL 75 

and the trouble and the patience, and, above all, 
are the kind of parents they ought to be. For 
training does not come chiefly through lectures 
or exhortations, or laws enforced by penalty. It 
comes chiefly through the atmosphere of the 
home and through the example of the parents. 
If you want your child to love the truth, love it 
yourself; if you want your child to love justice 
and purity and simplicity and honesty and cour- 
age, love them yourself. You cannot by your 
teaching give your child that which you do not 
possess. A profane man cannot teach a boy not 
to be profane. A smoking father cannot teach a 
boy not to smoke. "A drinking man cannot teach 
a boy not to drink. The boy will walk in his 
father's footsteps, and the more he honors his 
father the more likely he is to walk in those 
footsteps. 

I do not attempt to tell what is the education 
which parents should give. I only attempt to 
point out certain fundamental lessons necessary 
to a democracy that is educating itself to be 
a self-governing democracy, and in the family 
these three things are essential : Training by 
example as well as by precept in justice, truth- 
fulness, and obedience. 

What is the specific contribution which the 



76 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

Church should make to the education of the 
child ? I state my view of the difference in func- 
tion between the Church and the State in the 
words of an eminent Roman Catholic divine, not 
because I think they represent the dominant 
sentiment in the Roman Catholic Church, but be- 
cause they represent a sentiment very widely en- 
tertained in that Church, and I choose them that 
they may appear to be, as I think they truly are, 
neither distinctively Protestant nor Roman Catho- 
lic: — 

The Church has received from her Divine Founder 
the mission to teach the supernatural truths. . . . But 
the Church has not received the mission to make 
known the human sciences, she has not been estab- 
lished for the progress of nations in the arts and sci- 
ences, no more than to render them powerful and 
wealthy. . . . Her duty of teaching human sciences 
is only indirect — a work of charity or of necessity : 
of charity when they are not sufficiently taught by 
others who have that duty; of necessity when they 
are badly taught, that is, taught in a sense opposed 
to supernatural truth and morality. This is why the 
missionary, setting foot in a savage land, though he 
begins with the preaching of the Gospel, very soon 
establishes schools. . . . There are men who seem to 
assert that the Church has received the mission to 
teach human as well as divine science. They give 
to the words of Christ, Euntes docete (go and teach), 
an indefinite interpretation. But such an interpreta- 



THE HOME, THE CHURCH, THE SCHOOL 77 

tion is evidently false. . . . The question here is not 
of the authority of the State over the teaching of re- 
ligion and over theological schools. It is clear that 
the State has no jurisdiction in that sphere. . . . We 
affirm that the State has authority over education. 
This authority is included in that general authority 
with which the State is invested for promoting the 
common good, for guaranteeing to each man his rights, 
for preventing abuses. . . . The State has the right 
to prevent the unworthy and the incapable from as- 
suming the role of educators. . . . The State has au- 
thority to see to it that parents fulfill their duty of 
educating their children, to compel them, if need be, 
and to substitute itself for them in the fulfillment 
of this duty in certain cases. ... If the State may 
coerce parents who neglect the education of their 
children, so also may it determine a minimum of in- 
struction and make it obligatory. ... If the State 
may exact on the part of the teachers evidences of ca- 
pability, on the part of children a minimum of instruc- 
tion, if it may punish negligent parents, it follows that 
it may also prescribe the teaching of this or that 
branch, the knowledge of which, considering the cir- 
cumstances, is deemed necessary to the majority of the 
citizens. No more difficulty in the one case than in the 
other. Moreover, it is not needed that we should re- 
mark that the State has over all schools the authority 
of inspection as to hygiene and public morality. 1 

I wish to supplement that statement with one 

1 From a pamphlet of Dr. Bouquillon, of the Roman Catholic 
University of Washington, D. C, 1893. Now out of print. 



78 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

other. The State has no moral right to prohibit 
the parents from teaching, or the Church from 
teaching. If in France, as is alleged, the Roman 
Catholic Church in its schools is giving its chil- 
dren teaching which is undermining the author- 
ity of the Republic, the State has a right, and 
that right is recognized by this extract, to pro- 
hibit such teaching ; but it has no moral right 
to issue a general law that the Church shall do 
no teaching except as directed and controlled by 
parties who are inimical to the Church. 

What is the Church, as distinguished from the 
State and from the home, to teach? Broadly 
speaking, we may say, religion ; more narrowly, 
to teach the relation of the children and of the 
adults to God, and to the invisible and eternal 
world. This is the specific function of the Church. 
It may go further ; it often has gone further. 
But if it neglects this duty, who shall take it up ? 
I do not propose to criticise synagogue schools, 
for I know nothing about them; nor Roman 
Catholic parochial schools, for I know almost 
nothing: about them. But I do know something 
about Protestant Sunday-schools, and as a Pro- 
testant I have a right to criticise the Sunday- 
schools of that large body of churches with 
which I am myself identified. There are many 
noble and worthy exceptions; but, with those 



THE HOME, THE CHURCH, THE SCHOOL 79 

exceptions, the Church is not, through its Sun- 
day-schools, teaching the youth religion ; that is, 
it is not teaching the youth, with any effective- 
ness, their relation to God and to the immortal 
life. For the most part, Sunday-school teaching 
consists of lay sermonettes, or else of asking out 
of the book questions which are to be answered 
by the pupil. Even if the school has begun to 
get hold of modern criticism and teach a little of 
that, it is not so taught as to give a comprehen- 
sive conception of the Bible, according to either 
the old conception or the new. I think it was a 
graduate of one of our Sunday-schools who, on 
being examined as to his Bible knowledge, was 
asked the question, " Who wrote the first two 
chapters of the Book of Genesis ?" and replied, 
" The first chapter of Genesis was written by 
God, and is generally correct; the second chapter 
of Genesis was written by the Lord God, and is 
full of inaccuracies." 

I should like to know how many children who 
have graduated from our Sunday-schools could 
tell anything comprehensively about the Bible, 
which is the textbook of religion for the Protes- 
tant. How many of them know that it contains 
sixty-six books, and was written by forty or fifty 
different writers? How many of them know that 
it is a body of literature which was a thousand 



80 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

years or more being collected? How many of 
them know that it contains almost every type of 
literature known in the literatures of the world? 
How many of them have any comprehensive con- 
ception of its political teachings? How many of 
them know that the Hebrew Commonwealth was 
the first government on the face of the globe to 
put restrictions upon the absolute power of a mon- 
archy, the first to have a popular legislative as- 
sembly, the first to ask for a judgment of the 
people in general elections, the first to organize 
government in three departments, — legislative, 
judicial, and executive, — the first to prohibit class 
or caste distinctions, the first to make any pro- 
vision for popular instruction? How many of the 
children of our Sunday-schools know the simple 
facts of its political teaching? And yet this self- 
governing Republic is anchored on those great 
fundamental principles. How many of them know 
the ethical teachings of the Bible? How many of 
them could give anything like a comprehensive, 
or even a partial, fragmentary interpretation of 
those teachings? How many of them know that 
the Ten Commandments form the briefest, the 
most comprehensive, the most compact code of 
morals the world has ever seen, down even to this 
day? How many of them know that the four 
great rights of man — the rights of property, of 



THE HOME, THE CHURCH, THE SCHOOL 81 

person, of reputation, of the family — cover all 
the fundamental rights of humanity ? How many 
of them know what the rights of property are as 
interpreted by the Bible, or the rights of the per- 
son, or the rights of the family, or the rights of 
reputation? How many of them can tell what 
are even the more simple and fundamental prin- 
ciples inculcated in this book which we call the 
Book of Religion? How many of them could tell 
anything about what it teaches respecting God? 
How many of them know that the Hebrew peo- 
ple were the first people and the Hebrew litera- 
ture the first literature to recognize that God is 
a righteous God and demands righteousness of 
his children, and demands nothing else? How 
many of them know that the Hebrew Scriptures 
were the first literature and the Hebrew people 
the first people to recognize the fact that God 
will help men to righteousness if they wish to be 
helped? These are the truths that lie upon the 
surface and are wrought into the texture of the 
Bible; the truths that every Christian ought to 
know, and never will be taught by homiletic ser- 
monettes given by uninstructed teachers upon 
selected passages of eight or ten verses a Sunday. 
Never ! 

The family is to train the child in habits of 



82 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

obedience to outward law and obedience to the 
inward laws of justice and truth. The Church is 
to teach man's relation to God, and, incidentally 
growing out of that, man's relation to his fellow- 
men ; to teach also his relation to the future, and, 
growing out of that, his duty in the present. 
What ought our public schools to teach? I am 
not attempting in this book to cover the whole 
ground of education. There are many things 
which our public schools ought to teach and are 
teaching, of which I shall not speak ; I consider 
only those things which the schools ought to 
teach which are essential to be taught to self- 
governing members of a self-governing commu- 
nity. 

In the first place, the State ought to teach 
every boy and every girl the duty of, and give 
to every boy and every girl the capacity for, self- 
support. The first duty of a self-governing mem- 
ber of a self-governing community is not to be 
a beggar; his first duty is to put as much into 
the treasury of life as he takes out of it. I do 
not mean that every man and every woman is to 
be in a wage-earning profession ; I do not mean 
that every man and every woman is to pass over 
the counter something for which on the other 
side of the counter money will be given in return. 
There are no members of the community that are 



THE HOME, THE CHURCH, THE SCHOOL 83 

so ill paid in money for their splendid service as 
the wives and mothers in the home. When I hear 
a modern reformer demanding a woman's eco- 
nomic independence, I laugh at her. The wife is 
not more economicallyMependent on the husband 
than the husband is on the wife, as many a hus- 
band could testify whose fortune has been due to 
the wise administration of his wife, and some hus- 
bands could also sorrowfully testify, who cannot 
make money so fast but that their wives can 
spend it still faster. The first duty of a citizen of 
a self-governing community is to be self-support- 
ing, and therefore the first duty of the public 
school is to give the boy and the girl capacity 
for self-support. The end of education is the de- 
velopment of character ; the test of character is 
capacity for service. The Hebrew law required 
every professional student first to learn a trade. 
So Paul, though he became a rabbi, was a tent- 
maker, and it stood him in good stead. There is 
a curious prejudice against industrial education 
which I do not understand ; a curious notion that 
industrial education is on a lower plane than a 
literary or scholastic education. Is a lawyer indus- 
trious ? then a law school is an industrial school. 
Is a doctor industrious? then a medical school is 
an industrial school. Is a minister industrious? 
then a theological school is an industrial school. 



84 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

Whatever fits a man for public service in practi- 
cal industry in life is industrial education. 

Nor can I understand the prejudice against 
manual training — the education of the hand. I 
always hesitate to criticise those who directed my 
childhood. We older men look back across the 
gap of years and remember the defects rather than 
the excellencies in our training. But as I look 
back it seems to me that I got the idea that the 
only use of the hand was to hold a book, and the 
only use of the eyes was to read it. That nature 
is to be studied, that we must know how to act as 
well as to think, that the hand is to have skill to 
do as well as the brain skill to plan — this was 
hardly in the education of my childhood, and is 
not too much in the education of the children of 
to-day. Germany is in advance of us in this re- 
spect. It differentiates its system of education, and 
provides alike for the mechanical, the commercial, 
and the professional career. But not by the same 
kind of education. Thought is valuable only as it 
is translated into action. I hope I am giving my 
readers some thoughts in this book ; but if that 
is the end, the book is useless. It is useful only 
as parents and teachers put them into action. 
The function of manual training is to connect the 
brain with the hand, and thus show how to trans- 
late thoughts into deeds. 



THE HOME, THE CHURCH, THE SCHOOL 85 

In the second place, every self-governing mem- 
ber of a self-governing community ought to be 
taught to think for himself. Our slaves, says 
Plato, take the thoughts of others and act upon 
them; we might transpose that sentence and say, 
He who takes the thoughts of others without 
thinking for himself is a slave. Give the ballot to 
a thousand men without capacity to do their own 
thinking and they will blindly follow the dema- 
gogues who appeal to their passions and their 
prejudices. If we want an autocracy, then we 
should educate the boys and girls to act unques- 
tioningly upon authority and obey it ; if we want 
a democracy, we should educate our boys and girls 
to think for themselves. And there is no possible 
way by which we can educate them to think for 
themselves in one department of life and not in 
another. We cannot teach our boys and girls to 
think in the realm of politics without teaching 
them to think independently in the realm of re- 
ligion and in the realm of industry. He who will 
ask why in the one case will ask why in the 
other. There is no possible way by which the 
workingman can be made free from the political 
boss and subservient to the industrial boss ; no 
possible way by which the great American people 
can be made free from the government of machines 
in politics and subject to government of ecclesi- 



86 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

astics in the Church. There must be independence 
everywhere or nowhere. 

In the third place, our boys and girls must be 
taught to understand the thoughts of other men 
whom they do not agree with, for they have to go 
out into life and work with other men they do not 
agree with, and we cannot work with another 
efficiently unless we can understand him. We may 
differ from him, but we must understand him. 
Our boys and girls must be taught to be open- 
minded ) the windows must be thrown open, and 
all thoughts and all teachings they must be ready 
to consider, weigh, and judge. This Christian boy 
must learn to understand what is agnosticism, and 
this agnostic boy what is Christianity ; this Roman 
Catholic boy what is Protestantism, and this Pro- 
testant boy what is Roman Catholicism ; this laborer 
what are the theories of capitalists, and this capi- 
talist what are the theories of the laborer ; this 
Republican what are the opinions of the Demo- 
crats, and this Democrat what are the opinions of 
the Republicans. We take our own church paper, 
and do not know what the other church paper is 
saying ; we take our own political paper, and do 
not know what the other political paper is saying ; 
the laborer goes to the trades union and does not 
know what the capitalists are saying, and the 
capitalists go to their own meeting and hardly 



THE HOME, THE CHURCH, THE SCHOOL 87 

know what the trades unions are saying — except 
when they cannot help but hear. Power to think 
for one's self, power to understand those one does 
not agree with — these two things are absolutely 
essential to peace, harmony, and cooperation in 
a self-educating and self-governing community. 

And, next, understanding of the great laws of 
the social order — what they are, how they oper- 
ate. What does the Golden Rule mean as applied 
to modern conditions? How ought the conscience 
to act? What ought to be the moral judgment 
on current questions ? I know some eminent 
teachers who think that all moral instruction 
should be left to the family and the Sunday- 
school, and I know some others who think it 
should be only a by-product. I cannot agree with 
either. If we must understand the great laws of 
nature and how its forces act, we must also under- 
stand the great laws of human nature and how its 
forces act. The public school ought to be set free 
from the conventions which have sometimes en- 
chained it, and not only be permitted but required 
to teach the great fundamental laws of person, of 
property, of chastity, and of reputation. 

This self-governing community must have great 
ideals. Progress is proceeding from a past achieve- 
ment toward a future of as yet unrealized achieve- 
ment. The man who has no ideals is dead and 



88 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

does not know it, though his neighbors do. The 
nation that has no ideals is dead ; it has no energy 
or enterprise. Energy and enterprise depend on 
the ideals. It was an idealist who in the days of 
the stagecoach conceived of the steam locomotive. 
It was an idealist who dreamed of the time when 
we should communicate by electricity. Idealists 
have enabled us to run like the deer, swim like 
the fish, fly like the bird. When it was proposed 
to add Oregon to the United States, practical men 
said, " It will never do ; before your Representa- 
tive can get from Oregon to Washington, Con- 
gress will have adjourned." It was an idealist who 
conceived the idea of building a steel bridge from 
Washington to Oregon. The fathers of our Revo- 
lution were idealists, and gave to the world their 
vision of a Government resting on self-govern- 
ment. If we ever come into that state in which 
we think, as some people seem to think, that 
nothing can be done to-morrow which was not 
done yesterday, we shall be ready to be wrapped 
in our burial clothes and put in our graves. 

But we must also know how to test these ideals 
and determine what are realizable hopes and what 
are impossible dreams. We must not only know 
the great literature of the past, written by the 
idealists, we must know the great experiences of 
the past in which ideals have been tested and tried. 



THE HOME, THE CHURCH, THE SCHOOL 89 

We must not only know how to think, but we 
must know how to apply our thinking to the 
actualities of life, and how to test our thinking 
by the practical experience of the world. This is 
the value of history. The knowledge of history 
is, or ought to be, the knowledge of what the 
world has been doing, how the world has been 
growing. The life of the past shines out as a 
headlight on the track of the future. If all our 
country had understood the experience of the 
French Revolution, we should hardly have had a 
greenback heresy foisted on us. If all the coun- 
try had realized what universal ignorance suf- 
frage had wrought into San Domingo, we should 
hardly have had universal suffrage in the South- 
ern States foisted upon us. If all the world knew 
to-day the result of the Socialistic experiment in 
other lands, our idealistic Socialists would at least 
pause a little — perhaps. 

A self-governing community must not only 
know how to act and how to think ; there is some- 
thing more than action, something more than 
thinking. Life includes beauty as well as know- 
ledge. No man is a complete man who goes 
through the land blind to beauty and deaf to 
music. A true nation, a prosperous nation, a liv- 
ing nation, lives not only in its industrial activi- 
ties, its commercial activities, its theological and 



90 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

philosophical activities ; it lives also in its artistic 
activities. America needs to know what the 
Greeks knew so well, who had one word both for 
virtue and beauty. To them virtue was a form of 
beauty, and beauty was a form of virtue. Good- 
ness, beauty, truth — these are but three aspects 
of the one great reality. It is in vain that Mr. 
Carnegie multiplies his libraries if we are not 
multiplying intelligent readers to get lif e out of 
them. It is in vain that Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan 
endows and enriches the Metropolitan Museum if 
we are not educating boys and girls to take delight 
in statuary and in pictures. It is in vain that we 
build music-halls and opera-houses if our boys and 
girls are not so educated that their life will be 
expressed and enriched by the music which is 
there rendered. 

What is all this but saying that we must edu- 
cate for life and by means of life ? We must attach 
our schools to life. We must bring them forth 
from life. We must make education the process 
from a child's experience to a man's experience, 
as the growth of the plant is from the seed. Some 
teachers tell me that in their schools they find 
the children of the rich more awkward than the 
children of the poor, because the children of the 
poor have been expected to take care of them- 
selves and the children of the rich have been taken 



THE HOME, THE CHURCH, THE SCHOOL 91 

care of so much that they do not know how to 
move with gracefulness. Some teachers tell me 
that the children of the poor grapple with intel- 
lectual problems better than the children of the 
rich, because the children of the poor have been 
thrown upon their own resources and compelled 
to grapple, while the children of the rich have 
been taken out of life by a mistaken kindness. 
Perhaps this is too broad a generalization from too 
narrow an experience ; I do not know ; but this 
I do know, that wherever a child is robbed of the 
experience of life he is robbed of the benefits of 
education. Education must begin with experience 
and go through experience to a perfected experi- 
ence. Pestalozzi went at one period of his career 
to Paris, and a friend endeavored to present him 
to Napoleon the Great. Napoleon declined. "I 
have no time for A B C," he said. When Pesta- 
lozzi returned to his home, his friends asked him, 
u Did you see Napoleon the Great ? " " No, I did 
not see Napoleon the Great, and Napoleon the 
Great did not see me." Napoleon the Great lived 
to see the empire which he had founded on soldiers 
crumble to pieces because he had had no time to 
attend to A B C. 

The builders of this Nation are not the men at 
Washington; the builders of this Nation are the 
fathers, the mothers, the teachers. To educate 



92 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

the child from the cradle, to habituate him to 
obedience, to develop in him the sense of justice 
and of truthfulness, to train him to habits of a 
divine manhood, then, with this training, to launch 
him into the school, and there, not to work against 
the school, as some mothers do, not to be indif- 
ferent to the school, as many fathers are, but to 
cooperate with the teacher, in support of her au- 
thority, in sympathy with her instruction, in aid of 
her work, and in that cooperation to connect all 
that teaching with the home and with the life, so 
that this child, growing to manhood, may learn 
how to support himself, to do his own thinking, 
to understand the thoughts of his neighbor, to 
live with that neighbor in harmony, in justice, 
righteousness, and fair dealing; to give the child 
splendid ideals beckoning him on, to give him the 
lessons of past history holding him in check, to 
give him the joy that comes through beauty, and 
to make all his teaching grow out of his life and 
fit him for his life — this is the work of education 
in a self-educating community preparing itself 
for self-government. 



CHAPTER VII 

PRESENT CONDITIONS IN INDUSTRY 

A recent English writer has thus described a 
scene which one may witness any Sunday morn- 
ing in the streets of one of the greatest commer- 
cial capitals of Christendom, the city of London : 

Sunday morning witnesses the strangest sight in 
these streets. The lodgers hold a bazaar. From end 
to end the railings are hung with fusty and almost 
moving rags, the refuse of the week's picking and 
stealing, which no pawnbroker can be brought to buy. 
Neighbors, barely dressed, many of them with black 
eyes, bandaged heads, and broken mouths, turn out to 
inspect this frightful collection of rags. There is bar- 
gaining, buying, and exchanging. Practically naked 
children look on and learn the tricks of the trade. If 
you could see the bareheaded women, with their hang- 
ing hair, their ferocious eyes, their brutal mouths ; if 
you could see them there, half dressed, and that in a 
draggle-tailed slovenliness incomparably horrible; and 
if you could hear the appalling language loading their 
hoarse voices, and from their phrases receive into your 
mind some impression of their modes of thought, you 
would say that human nature in the earliest and most 
barbarous of its evolutionary changes had never, could 
never have, been like this ; that these people are mov- 



94 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

ing on in a line of their own ; that they have produced 
something definitely non-human, which is as distinct 
from humanity as the anthropoid ape. Ruth, or even 
Mary of Magdala, at the beginning of the line ; two 
thousand years of progress ; and then these corrupt and 
mangy things at the end ! This is not to be believed. 
No ; they do not belong to the advancing line, they 
have never been human. For the honor of humanity 
one rejects them. 1 

The picture is not too dark. Any one who has 
visited the slums of London can attest its photo- 
graphic reality j and although I think the slums 
of London are probably the worst slums in Chris- 
tendom, worse than those of Paris or Naples, 
worse than those of New York or Chicago, yet 
almost every civilized city contains a population 
somewhat answering to the description from which 
I have taken this paragraph. Different in degree, 
but not different in kind, of misery , vice, and de- 
gradation, such are some of our neighbors in 
most of our great cities. How T came they here? 

What responsibility have we for them? I re- 
call that story of the rich man who dressed in fine 
linen and fared sumptuously every day, and for- 
got the beggar at his door. You and I, reader, 
are not rich men, as w T e sometimes count riches, 
and perhaps fare not very sumptuously every day, 

1 Harold Begbie, Twice-Born Men, pp. 34, 35. 



PRESENT CONDITIONS IN INDUSTRY 95 

and yet if we forget this Lazarus at our door we 
shall subject ourselves to something of that con- 
demnation which the Master visited on the indif- 
ferent rich man of the olden time. 

What shall we do with this fruit of Christen- 
dom? How came the tree to bear such fruit? 
These are the questions to which in this and the 
two succeeding chapters I ask my readers' atten- 
tion. First, I shall trace rapidly the course of his- 
tory which has produced these phenomena ; next, 
point out briefly some proposed remedies for the 
evil. 1 

At first the capitalist owned the laborer : that 
was slavery. Then the capitalist owned the land 
and the laborer was attached to the land ; the la- 
borer owed the landlord service, the landlord owed 
the laborer protection : that was feudalism. Then 
came individualism in industry, as there came in- 
dividualism in government ; the laborer was free, 
no longer attached to the master, no longer at- 
tached to the land, might go where he would, 
owed nothing to the master ; and the master was 
free, owed no longer protection to the slave, owed 
no longer protection to the villein. Each was free ; 

1 Habitual readers of The Outlook and readers of my book 
publications on social topics will find the ideas, and perhaps even 
the phraseology, of this chapter familiar. I am here simply put- 
ting into compact form ideals which I have been persistently 
urging by voice and pen for nearly half a century. 



96 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

and the laborer could sell his labor in the high- 
est market, the capitalist could buy his labor in 
the cheapest market. 

This might have served if society had remained 
individualistic. But society did not remain indi- 
vidualistic ; it became organized. Two causes pro- 
duced this industrial organization. First, the dis- 
covery of natural forces to do the world's drudgery 
for it, and the accompanying invention of ma- 
chinery. Second, the discovery that the division 
of labor was of great economic advantage in the 
production of articles. In the place of single looms 
owned and operated by single weavers, there grew 
up, through the discovery of steam and the in- 
ventions that followed it, the great factory, with 
its numerous spinning-wheels and its numerous 
looms. Thrifty men who had put by a little money, 
or fortunate men who had inherited fortunes, com- 
bined and built the factory in combination. The 
partnership and the corporation followed ; and so 
grew up, by a natural and necessary process, a 
combination of capital. But, in order to run the 
factory, the railway, the mine, it was necessary 
that labor should be organized as well as capital, 
and each particular kind of labor assigned to the 
particular laborer. Thus organized labor and or- 
ganized capital grew up side by side. 

We sometimes find men discussing the question 



PRESENT CONDITIONS IN INDUSTRY 97 

whether labor ought to organize. Labor must be 
organized. We cannot carry on modern industry 
unless labor is organized. We cannot have a loco- 
motive engineer saying, " This morning I will run 
a locomotive, to-morrow morning I prefer to be 
a brakeman, and the next morning I will not come 
at all." Railway workmen must be organized, and 
so must factory workmen and mine workmen. The 
only real question is whether the men who con- 
stitute the organization shall have anything to say 
respecting the nature of its organization. Organi- 
zation of capital, organization of labor, that is 
inherent, indisputably inherent, in the modern 
industrial organization. 

Thus has grown up the modern system, some- 
times called capitalism, sometimes called the wages 
system. Under this system a comparatively small 
body of men own all the tools and implements 
with which industry is carried on : the lands, the 
mines, the factories, the railways, the forests; and 
a great body of men do the work with these tools 
and implements, not owning them. The men who 
own the tools we call capitalists, the men who do 
the work with the tools we call laborers. Sometimes 
the laborers hire the tools from the capitalists and 
pay what we call rent ; sometimes the capitalist 
hires the laborer to work with the tools and pays 
what we call wages. Occasionally the capitalist and 



98 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

the laborer make a bargain that the laborer shall 
work with the capitalist's tools and divide the pro- 
ceeds in some ratio between the two. That is not 
an uncommon method on some of the Southern 
plantations to-day. But whichever way the ar- 
rangement is made, one small body of men own 
practically all the tools and implements with which 
industry is carried on, and those tools and imple- 
ments are called capital, and the men who own 
them are called capitalists; and a great body of 
men carry on the industry with these tools and 
implements, and they are called laborers or wage- 
earners. 

Many persons imagine that this wages system 
has lasted from eternity and will last to eternity, 
because they have never known any other system. 
In point of fact, it was born about the beginning 
of the nineteenth century, and I do not believe 
that it will outlast the twentieth century. The evils 
of this system are many and great, and have been 
often recognized by scholars of every class. 

In the first place, this system divides society 
into two great classes, more or less hostile : a body 
of laborers who desire to get the largest possible 
wage, that is, the largest possible share of the 
proceeds of the industry, and a body of capital- 
ists who, except as their desires are modified by 
humanity, desire to pay the least possible wage to 



PRESENT CONDITIONS IN INDUSTRY 99 

get the product of the industry. Both desires were 
not only recognized, they were fostered, by the old 
political economy. The capitalist was instructed 
to buy the labor in the cheapest market, that is, 
he was to pay as little wages as he could and get 
the work done, and the laborer was instructed to 
sell his labor in the highest market, that is, he was 
to do as little work as possible and get his wages ; 
and a good many of both classes lived up to the 
principle thus inculcated. 

In the second place, this wages system inevi- 
tably creates a concentration of wealth. It creates 
a small class of more or less, and generally in- 
creasingly, wealthy men, and a large class of more 
or less dependent men. The startling facts are 
thus given in Charles B. Spahr's book on "The 
Present Distribution of Wealth," the best book, 
I think, on the subject in the English language: 

To sum up the whole situation, therefore, it appears 
that the general distribution of incomes in the United 
States is wider and better than in most of the coun- 
tries of western Europe. Despite this fact, however, 
one eighth of the families in America receive more than 
half of the aggregate income, and the richest one per 
cent receives a larger income than the poorest fifty 
per cent. In fact, this small class of wealthy prop- 
erty-owners receives from property alone as large an 
income as half our people receive from property and 
labor. 



100 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

I would like to put that in a little more dra- 
matic form. The average wage of the workingman 
in America ranges from 75 cents to $5 a day. 
The wage which Mr. Gould received in his life- 
time was $ 13,000 a day ; the discrepancy the work- 
ingman thinks too large, and I personally agree 
with him. Mr. Vanderbilt — Cornelius, the elder 
— died, after a long and useful life, leaving a 
property estimated by the newspapers at $200,- 
000,000 ; I do not vouch for the estimate — I take 
it as I find it. If Adam was created, as our old 
chronology thought he was, six thousand years 
ago, and if he had lived to this day, and had been 
an industrious worker and had never lost a day 
through sickness or misfortune, and had laid up 
$100 every working day of every year of that 
six thousand years, he would not have laid up as 
much money as Cornelius Vanderbilt acquired in 
one lifetime. 

This is the second objection to the present sys- 
tem : inequality in the distribution of the product 
of labor. The laborer who works with the tools 
gets too small a share, the tool-owner gets too 
large a share, and the great laboring class are de- 
pendent on the tool-owners for the opportunity 
to work. " In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat 
bread," says the divine command ; the wages sys- 
tem says to hundreds and thousands of Ameri- 



PRESENT CONDITIONS IN INDUSTRY 101 

cans, and untold multitudes in the Old World, 
Thou shalt not earn thy daily bread by the sweat 
of thy brow — thou shalt have no chance. In a 
prosperous time there are comparatively few men 
who cannot find a chance to do some work some- 
where for some sort of pay ; but a few years ago 
there were tramping through this country, it was 
estimated, three millions of men seeking for jobs 
— some of them earnestly seeking, some of them 
not so much in earnest, but still out of work. 
Josephine Shaw Lowell, who is a careful statisti- 
cian, reported that one year there were 220,000 
individuals helped by charity in the city of New 
York, and she says, " There is no possibility of 
the duplication of individuals in this estimate." 
I do not vouch for these figures in the one case 
or in the other, but they unquestionably represent 
immense masses of men and women who live on 
the verge of starvation, and who, if they are laid 
aside for a week, or even for a day, by illness or 
misfortune, wonder where the next week's bread 
will come from for their wives and their children. 
Sometimes the contrast is pathetic, sometimes 
dramatic. One day the diners at the Waldorf-As- 
toria were startled by having an Indian club flung 
through the plate-glass window and fall upon 
their table. Men rushed out and arrested the as- 
sailant, and he was taken to the police station ; 



102 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

and this was his story : That he was a mechanic ; 
that he was out of work ; that he could get no- 
thing to do anywhere ; that he was an expert with 
Indian clubs ; that it finally occurred to him that 
he could give some exhibitions with the Indian 
clubs in saloons ; that he went from one saloon to 
another ; that he could earn nothing by his ex- 
hibition ; and finally, hungry and sore at heart, 
and walking up Fifth Avenue, he saw these men 
and women feasting on viands that they could 
not digest after they had eaten them, and in a 
moment of passionate rage flung his club through 
the window. I believe he was locked up. I 
thought the magistrate showed wisdom in giving 
him a good dinner. Reader, imagine, if you can, 
yourself walking the street, looking for work, and 
compelled to come back night after night to 
hungry children and a disappointed wife. 

Out of this dependent class — dependent on the 
capitalist for opportunity to work — there grows 
another great dependent class. Out of the tramps 
seeking for work the beggars are developed, and 
out of the beggars the sneak-thieves, and out of 
the sneak-thieves the burglars. Thus men grow 
up in an atmosphere of hostility to society. As 
there is a profession of lawyers, and one of doc- 
tors, and one of ministers, and one of teachers, 
so there is a profession of burglars, for which 



PRESENT CONDITIONS IN INDUSTRY 103 

children are trained from the cradle by men whose 
hearts have been embittered against modern so- 
ciety that refuses them a place, an opportunity, 
a right to live. I do not justify it, but I do not 
wonder at it. 

If this process was only accompanied at the 
end by something to compensate for it, if by this 
wage-earning system we were sacrificing some in 
order to develop a high and noble aristocracy, if 
we could only believe with Nietzsche that the end 
of civilization is to develop one single typical man, 
and we could find this man among our plutocrats, 
we might bear the condition with philosophy. 
But, in point of fact, neither the beggars nor the 
criminals are all found among the poor. 

Hark ! Hark ! The dogs do bark! 
The beggars are coming to town ; 
Some in rags, and some in tags, 
And some in velvet gowns. 

Yes, " some in velvet gowns." For the men and 
the women who do not by some kind of service, 
in the mill, in the factory, in the street, in the 
school-room, in the family, in the home, put into 
society as much as they take out belong in the 
beggar class, whether they tramp in outworn shoes 
or in steamers and automobiles. 

Nor do we find the criminals all recruited from 
the poor. There is to-day more than one man 



104 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

serving his sentence in the penitentiary who last 
year, as the president of a great corporation, oc- 
cupied a position of trust and honor in the com- 
munity. And it is a matter of common knowledge 
that there are men of large wealth who employ 
skilled lawyers to teach them how they can vio- 
late the law and yet escape the penalties of the 
law. Vice, in certain aspects of our rich soci- 
ety, is more gilded but not less awful than the 
same sort of vice which has been described by the 
writer quoted above, as existing in the slums of 
London. Sensuality and intoxication are not bet- 
ter because they are well dressed ; vice is no nobler 
in Fifth Avenue than it is on the East Side, nor 
the drunken bout the better for being incited by 
champagne instead of by whisky. 

What are the remedies ? Is there any remedy ? 

There are many persons who, so far as they 
have thought of it at all, consider that the only 
remedy is regulation by law, improvement by edu- 
cation, and amelioration by charity. The wages 
system seems to them inherent and essential. 
There is no getting along without it. But society 
can regulate the actions of the capitalist, and can 
easily regulate the actions of the workingman, and 
can punish the crimes into which either of them 
are led. At the same time, by the pulpit and the 
press, we can develop a better public conscience. 



PRESENT CONDITIONS IN INDUSTRY 105 

In addition, we can do something to relieve the 
distress and reform the vices which are born of 
this system. So, fifty years ago, good Christian 
men in the South believed that slavery was essen- 
tial to the well-being of society. It could not be 
abolished. But slaveholders could treat their 
slaves with justice and kindness, harsh slave laws 
could be repealed, certain rights of the slaves 
could be protected, and gradually, with the moral 
elevation of the race, the divine institution of 
slavery could be rid of its more noxious fruits. I 
do not believe that either regulation or gradual 
moral reform or charity will set the world right. 
I do not believe that the evil of our present in- 
dustrial system will be cured by anything less than 
a radical change, though it may be, and I think 
it will be, a gradual one. I am quite of the mind 
of Thomas Carlyle : — 

This general well and cesspool, once baled and clear, 
to-day will begin to fill itself anew. The universal 
Stygian quagmire is still there, opulent in women ready 
to be ruined, and in men ready. Toward the same sad 
cesspool will these waste currents of human sin ooze 
and gravitate, as heretofore. Except in draining the 
universal quagmire itself there is no remedy. 1 

More radical than mere regulation by law and 
amelioration by charity is the proposal for " col- 

1 Latter-Bay Pamphlets, Chapman & Hall ed., p. 24. 



106 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

lective bargaining." The individual workingman 
has no chance in dealing with collective capital. 
This workingman must take the wages the rail- 
way will give to him, because his going puts the 
railway to no inconvenience ; but his going means 
idleness and misery to him. This factory man 
must take the wages which the factory offers, 
if he stands alone, because his individual with- 
drawal produces no inconvenience to the factory; 
but for him his withdrawal is from something to 
nothing. So workingmen have organized in trade 
unions to protect their interests and put them on 
an equality with organized capital in their bar- 
gaining. They have organized in trade unions in 
order that labor may act as a body in its bargain 
with capital acting as a body in its bargaining. I 
think they have done well. If I were a working- 
man, I should desire to join the trade union of 
my trade, though whether I joined or not would 
depend somewhat, I am sure, on what kind of a 
union it happened to be. Trade unions have raised 
wages, improved conditions, shortened hours, 
called public attention to labor conditions that 
were intolerable, helped to lessen the hours of 
woman's labor, helped to get children out of the 
factory and the mine, produced a spirit of co- 
operation among workingmen, and promoted ar- 
bitration for the settlement of labor disputes. All 



PRESENT CONDITIONS IN INDUSTRY 107 

this labor unions have done. But labor unions in 
competitive bargaining with capitalistic unions 
do not constitute the consummation of industrial 
democracy. 

The democracy of America is two democracies, 
one individual, one social; one inherited from 
France and pagan Rome, the other inherited from 
the Puritans and the Hebrew Commonwealth. 
Out of these two democracies this present Ameri- 
can democracy of the twentieth century has grown, 
gradually and increasingly taking on the social 
aspect ; so that we are no longer trying in this 
country to develop merely a community of indi- 
viduals governing themselves, we are attempting 
to create a self-governing community, a com- 
munity that cooperates and combines in opera- 
tion for its common interest. That is not accom- 
plished by organizing all the workingmen on the 
one side and all the capitalists on the other side, 
that they may drive their bargains with each other 
on something like equal terms. That is not a self- 
governing brotherhood. If A has a house to sell 
and B wishes to buy a house, it is well enough for 
A to put what price he pleases and B to offer what 
price he pleases, and let the negotiations go on in- 
definitely. But when the owners of the coal mines 
of Pennsylvania are on one side and the coal 
workers are on the other side, and one group says, 



108 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

We will not work until you come to our terms, 
and the other says, You shall not work until you 
come to our terms — the rest of us freeze. Or if, 
on the other hand, the laborer says, Raise my 
wages and add it to your bill, and the capitalist 
says, I will raise your wages and add it to my 
bill, we get high prices, from which the com- 
munity is now suffering. Peace brings one injury, 
war brings the other. A bargain between two in- 
dividuals concerns only the bargainers ; but in a 
bargain between ten thousand workingmen and 
ten thousand shareholders in a great corporation 
the community is interested. And whether the 
bargain is not made at all, or whether it is made 
without regard to the interests of the general pub- 
lic, in either case the general public suffers. Col- 
lective bargaining furnishes some protection to 
the individual laborer from the injustice which in- 
evitably follows from bargaining by an individual 
laborer with organized capital. But it furnishes no 
protection to the community. And it does not 
bring industrial peace or create a true industrial 
brotherhood. 

The two other remedies proposed — Political 
Socialism and Industrial Democracy — I shall con- 
sider in the next two chapters. 



CHAPTER VIII 

POLITICAL SOCIALISM 

There are two radical and even revolutionary 
changes between which Democracy has to make 
its choice, if the spirit of Democracy is ever to 
dominate American industrial institutions : — the 
first is Political Socialism ; the second is Industrial 
Democracy. If any of my readers are inclined 
to think that Political or State Socialism, as in 
this chapter defined, is no longer maintained in 
Socialistic circles, I can only say, first, that I 
hope he is right, but, second, that my observa- 
tion of the currents of to-day leads me to agree 
with Edmond Kelly, an advocate of a modified 
Political Socialism, in his statement, " State So- 
cialism, therefore, is the form probably most in 
vogue among workingmen." l And I believe the 
best way to meet it is to define it clearly, and to 
distinguish it from what may be called voluntary 
Socialism, but what I prefer to call " Industrial 
Democracy." I avoid the term State Socialism 
because that term is often used to designate the 
doctrine of Bismarck : " That the State should 

1 Twentieth Century Socialism, p. 235. 



110 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

take better care of its needy members than here- 
tofore is not only a dictate of humaneness and 
Christianity, but also a necessity of conservative 
politics, which should aim to cultivate in the non- 
possessing classes of the population, who are at 
the same time the more numerous and least in- 
structed, the view that the State is not only a 
necessary but also a beneficent institution." This 
is directly opposed to Socialism which aims to 
abolish the distinction between possessing and 
non-possessing classes. 

It is as difficult to define Socialism as it is to 
define Orthodoxy ; whatever definition one offers, 
there is sure to be a Socialist to declare that the 
definition is wrong. For there are many types of 
Socialists. Among them are some discontented 
men who want a larger share of wage and a less 
share of work ; some cranks who think they could 
manage the universe, though they cannot manage 
themselves ; some idealists who dream beautiful 
dreams, but do not understand human conditions 
or human nature ; some great thinkers who have 
done good work for the world and whom the 
world ought to recognize as teachers and leaders ; 
and some in whom these contradictory qualities 
are mingled in various proportions. And as there 
are many types of Socialists, so there are many 
varieties of Socialism. I speak of a single type 



POLITICAL SOCIALISM 111 

when I speak of Political Socialism, and, in order 
that I may not be accused of putting up a man 
of straw to knock him down, I invite these same 
Socialists to give my readers their definition of 
Socialism as they understand it. 

Says Mr. H. M. Hyndman : " In the end the 
entire power and means of production will belong 
to the State or its delegates, who will then be 
like the State itself, simply one great body of 
equal men organized to act in concert, with lead- 
ers chosen by themselves." * 

That was in 1883, my Socialist friend may 
say, — twenty-seven years ago ; Socialism has 
changed since then. Consider, then, John Spar- 
go's definition, published in 1906, four years 
ago : " In the same general manner, we may sum- 
marize the principal functions of the State as 
follows : the State has the right and the power 
to organize and control the economic system, 
comprehending in that term the production and 
distribution of all social wealth, wherever private 
enterprise is dangerous to the social well-being, 
or is inefficient." And he adds in a note : " I use 
the word ' State' throughout in its largest, most 
comprehensive sense, as meaning the whole po- 
litical organization of society." 2 According to 

1 Historical Basis of Socialism in England, p. 457. 

2 Socialism, p. 219. 



112 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

Socialism as thus defined by two leading Social- 
ists, the political organization is to control and 
administer the industries of the community. 

Those are individual definitions, my Social- 
ist friend will say. Then compare with them 
an official definition from the German " Social 
Democratic Programme/' Germany, October, 
1891:— 

Nothing but the conversion of capitalistic private 
ownership of the means of production — the earth, and 
its fruits, mines, and quarries, raw material, tools, 
machines, means of exchange — into social ownership, 
and the substitution of Socialistic production, carried 
on by and for society in the place of the present pro- 
duction of commodities for exchange, can effect such 
a revolution that, instead of large industries and the 
steadily growing capacities of common production be- 
ing, as hitherto, a source of misery and oppression to 
the classes whom they have despoiled, they may become 
a source of the highest well-being, and of the most 
perfect and comprehensive harmony. 1 

English Political Socialism does not differ from 
Continental Political Socialism. It is thus epito- 
mized by Jane T. Stoddart in her summary of 
Socialistic Congresses : — 

Its cardinal principle is that the State should take 

1 The Erfurt " Social Democratic Programme n of October, 
1891, The Socialists at Worl:, p. 170. 



POLITICAL SOCIALISM 113 

out of private ownership the means of production, 
distribution, and exchange. This single sentence con- 
tains the quintessence of the creed drawn up at Social- 
ist Congresses. The workers, as Socialists believe, can 
be lifted out of their present misery only by the estab- 
lishment of a democratic Work- State. 1 

Or, if this epitome by an outsider is questioned, 
the reader may take this, quoted by Professor 
R. T. Ely, from one of its well-known leaders : 
" Perhaps no society of Socialists includes in its 
membership a larger number of highly educated 
men than the Fabian Society of England. One of 
its members, Mr. William Clarke, defines a So- 
cialist as 'one who believes that the necessary 
instruments of production should be held and 
organized by the community, instead of by indi- 
viduals or groups of individuals, within or out- 
side of the community.' " 2 

It may be said that the " community " is not 
synonymous with the " State." That is true ; 
and some Socialists anticipate in the community 
two legislative or g^ cm-legislative bodies: one 
industrial, the other political. But neither is the 
public school district identical with the town or 
the county. And yet we speak of education by 
the State in modern democratic communities as 

1 The New Socialism, p. 36. 

2 The Strength and Weakness of Socialism, p. 24. 



114 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

contrasted with education by the Church in the 
mediaeval feudal communities. The essence of 
Political Socialism is not the machinery by which 
the community will do its work, but the doctrine 
that all the tools and implements of organized 
labor shall be owned by the community and all or- 
ganized labor shall be directed by the community ; 
that, to quote again John Spargo, " the State has 
the right and the power to organize and control the 
economic system." It is also true that the Socialist 
State, as it is conceived by the Political Socialist, 
is in some important respects unlike the modern. 
In the view of some Socialists, all, or practically 
all, the injustices which now exist in society grow 
out of capitalism — that is, the private ownership 
of means of production — and will disappear 
when capitalization disappears and all the means 
of production are owned by the State. They hold, 
therefore, that there will no longer be any need 
of criminal laws or governmental power to pro- 
tect persons and property, and none for taxes 
because there will be no governmental expenses 
to be provided for. But this impossible vision 
deceives only the Socialists who dream ; it does 
not deceive the Socialists who think. Mr. Morris 
Hillquit, himself a radical Socialist, after defin- 
ing the State by the sentence, " the State makes 
and enforces laws and levies taxes," goes on to 



POLITICAL SOCIALISM 115 

define the Socialist State in the following para- 
graph: — 

For the purposes of public works, health, safety, and 
relief, the Socialist commonwealth will need vast ma- 
terial resources, probably more than the modern State, 
and these resources, in whatever form and under what- 
ever designation, can come only from the wealth-pro- 
ducing members of the commonwealth — thus there 
must be a direct or indirect tax on the labor or income 
of the citizen. The collection of this tax, the direction 
of the industries, and the regulation of the relations 
between the citizens will require some laws and some 
rules or instruments for their enforcement ; hence, even 
the element of coercion cannot be entirely absent in 
a Socialist society, at least not as far as the human 
mind can at present conceive. The Socialist society as 
conceived by modern Socialists differs, of course, very 
radically from the modern State in form and substance. 
It is not a class State, it does not serve any part of the 
population, and does not rule any other part of the 
population ; it represents the interests of the entire 
community, and it is for the benefit of the entire com- 
munity that it levies taxes and makes and enforces 
laws. It is not the slave-holding State, nor the feudal 
State, nor the State of the bourgeoisie — it is a Socialist 
State, but a State nevertheless, and since little or no- 
thing can be gained by inventing a new term, we shall 
hereafter designate the proposed organized Socialist 
society as the Socialist State. 1 

1 Socialism in Theory and Practice, pp. 99, 100. 



116 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

Basing my definitions on those thus quoted 
from the advocates of Socialism, let me give my 
own. Political or State Socialism means this : 
That the city, or the county, or the State, or the 
Nation, or all four, each in its separate sphere, 
shall own all the tools and implements of collec- 
tive industry, all the trolleys, all the railways, all 
the factories, all the mines, all the forests, in a 
word, all those industrial enterprises which are 
carried on by groups of men acting together; 
and this State shall organize and direct this com- 
plicated industry as it now organizes and directs 
the army or the post-office ; and it shall assign 
to every one of us his place in this great indus- 
trial organization, and shall take the proceeds and 
divide them equitably among all the people. 

The thoughtful reader will perceive that Po- 
litical Socialism continues the wages system, 
though in a new form. Society will still be divided 
industrially into employer and employed. The 
State will become the employer ; all the citizens of 
the State the employed. We shall all be employees 
working for a wage. The work will be assigned to 
us, the wage determined for us by our employer. 
It is true that the all, constituted as a State, will 
be the employer of the all as individuals. In this 
sense, and in this sense only, will the employer 
and the employed be the same. But in a Socialist 



POLITICAL SOCIALISM 117 

State all the members of the community would 
be as truly working under a wage system as are 
now the post-office clerks or the host of clerical 
employees at Washington or the soldiers in the 
standing army. Each man's task would be as- 
signed to him by the State, and by the State the 
hours and conditions of his labor would be de- 
termined and his wages allotted. 

This is not industrial liberty. It is industrial 
servitude to a new master. Because I believe in 
industrial liberty and not in industrial servitude 
to any master, I am opposed to Political Social- 
ism. " Conscience and honor," says H. A. Taine, 
" everywhere enjoin a man to retain for himself 
some portion of his independence." In Political 
Socialism the individual retains none of his in- 
dustrial independence. " If," continues M. Taine, 
" in every modern constitution the domain of the 
State ought to be limited, it is in modern democracy 
that it should be the most restricted." In Political 
Socialism the domain of the State is almost in- 
definitely extended. What the democratic State 
with unrestricted powers may do in destroying the 
independence of the individual M. Taine has well 
shown in his " History of the French Kevolution." 
The curious reader will find the elaborate restric- 
tions imposed by such a State upon the industrial 
and economic liberty of the individual illustrated 



118 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

in over thirty pages of Taine's " History of the 
French Revolution." ! In this State " the social 
pact gives the social body absolute power over 
all its members." The State takes his products 
of commerce, manufacture, and agriculture, takes 
" grain from the farmer's barn, hay in the reaper's 
shed, cattle in the fold, wine in the vats, hides at 
the butcher's, leather in the tanneries, soap, tal- 
low, sugar, brandy, cloths, linens, and the rest, 
in stores, depots, and warehouses," and pays for 
them in worthless paper, and sometimes not at all. 
It musters into military service all young men be- 
tween eighteen and twenty-five, and condemns to 
death whoever evades the military draft; summons 
under pain of imprisonment all workmen who are 
needed for the service of the State, installs them 
and assigns them their tasks. It claims the right 
to close the churches, demolish the steeples, melt 
down the bells, send all the sacred vessels to the 
mint, proscribe every form of worship, exile the 
priests, change the market days so that no Catholics 
shall be able to buy fish on a fast day. It claims 
the right to put limits on individual fortunes, to 
fix the price at which articles may be sold, to de- 
termine the rate of wages, to enact that the servant 
who works for any citizen shall belong to his 
family and sit at his table. In this universal bond- 

1 Volume iii, book 6, chapter 1. 



POLITICAL SOCIALISM 119 

age to the State it claims the right to dissolve all 
other bonds, as those of employer to employed, of 
worshiper to the Church, of husband and wife, of 
parent and child. Marriage is held to be simply 
a civil contract ; it may be dissolved at any time 
at the option of the parties. Parental authority 
is denied : " It is cheating nature to enforce those 
rights through constraint. The only right that 
parents have is their protection and watchful- 
ness." Such are some of the claims of the leaders 
of Democratic absolutism in the hour of its tem- 
porary victory ; such some of the regulations 
which they made during the brief period of their 
supremacy. They amply justify the warning of 
Alexis de Tocqueville : If " ever the free institu- 
tions of America are destroyed, that event may be 
attributed to the omnipotence of the majority." 
They emphasize the truth that the absolutism of 
democracy is as dangerous as any other form of 
absolutism, and that it is as necessary for the pro- 
tection of society to limit the power of a democratic 
State as it is to limit the power of an individual 
monarch. 

That Political Socialism demands, on the one 
hand, a great extension of the functions of gov- 
ernment, and, on the other hand, the practical 
abolition of all checks on the power of the ma- 
jority, is sufficiently illustrated by a reference to 



120 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

the platform of the Socialist party of the United 
States in the last Presidential election. That plat- 
form demanded as immediate measures " the col- 
lective ownership of all rail way s, telegraphs, tele- 
phones, steamship lines, and all other means of 
social transportation and communication" ; "the 
collective ownership of all industries which are 
organized on a National scale, and in which com- 
petition has virtually ceased to exist " ; and the 
perpetual public ownership, and by implication 
cultivation, of all mines, quarries, forests, and 
water-power. And it also demanded the abolition 
of the Senate, and of the power of the Supreme 
Court to pass upon the constitutionality of legis- 
lation enacted by Congress, power of the majority 
to amend the Constitution, and the election of all 
judges by the people for short terms. And these 
immediate measures were declared to be " but 
a preparation of the workers to seize the whole 
power of government, in order that they may 
thereby lay hold of the whole system of industry, 
and thus come to their rightful inheritance.' 1 
This last sentence appears to me to be a very 
clear definition of the aims of Political Socialism 
and a striking illustration of that " omnipotence 
of the majority " which Taine, over half a century 
ago, declared to be the greatest peril to America's 
free institutions. 



POLITICAL SOCIALISM 121 

That the Socialist State would infringe individ- 
ual liberty is frankly conceded by some Socialis- 
tic writers. Thus Karl Kautsky says : " It is true 
enough that Socialistic production is incompat- 
ible with full freedom of work ; L e. y with the free- 
dom of the laborer to work where, when, and as he 
wills. But this freedom of the workman is impossi- 
ble under any organized association of laborers, 
whether founded on capitalistic or collectivist 
principles." Similarly, Antoine Menger says: 
u We should be wrong, however, if we rejected 
entirely the idea which lies at the basis of these 
objections. While it is certain that for the com- 
munity as a whole the lessening of economic 
freedom is not necessarily bound up with the 
democratic Work-State, the danger does undoubt- 
edly exist that this form of Government should 
misuse its great economic powers for the enslave- 
ment of the individual, as the present individu- 
alistic Power-State misuses its political supre- 
macy." But perhaps the most striking of these 
testimonies to the possible despotism which might 
arise in a Socialistic State is this programme laid 
down by M. Deslinieres : — 

(a) The granting of arms to the executive gov- 
ernment for the prevention of all disorder from the 
beginning. This right is to be used with extreme mod- 
eration. 



122 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

(5) The suspension of the liberty of the press and 
of public meeting at the will of the government. 

(c) The restoration to the government of the right 
of appointing municipal bodies. 

(cZ) All men of full age who have not yet reached 
the age of retirement are to be required to work in the 
public service, in return for a fair salary. 

(e) For those who refuse, the punishment will be 
confiscation of all income above the wage of a journey- 
man of the third class ; for those with a smaller in- 
come, enrollment among the pensionaries of the social 
poor law. 

(/*) Any one who, without permission from the 
government, lives more than three months abroad is 
to lose his national rights and his property. 1 

It is true that the advocates of Political So- 
cialism indignantly deny that it infringes indi- 
vidual liberty. But after a somewhat careful 
study of their denials I cannot see that they do 
anything more than show that capitalism also 
infringes individual liberty. Their general con- 
clusion amounts to that frankly avowed by Karl 
Kautsky, that "the freedom of the laborer to 
work where, when, and as he wills " is impos- 
sible under any system. Mr. Edmond Kelly 2 
does indeed argue, with elaborate comparative 

1 All these quotations are taken from Jane T. Stoddart's 
book, The New Socialism, chapter 7. 

2 Twentieth Century Socialism, pp. 227-234. 



POLITICAL SOCIALISM 123 

statistics, that a work-day of four hours would be 
sufficient in the Socialist State for self-support, 
giving the rest of the waking hours for leisure. 
But leisure for twelve hours is not liberty for 
sixteen. A slave is not a free man because the 
master who allots him his tasks and gives him 
his support only requires four hours a day to the 
task allotted. 

This sacrifice of liberty in the Socialist State 
is supposed to be compensated for by the at- 
tainment of justice. The motto of democracy is 
liberty, equality, fraternity. By this Socialistic 
programme liberty is thrown overboard in order 
that equality and fraternity may be retained. I 
believe that no equality or fraternity can exist 
that is not founded on justice, and that the 
Socialistic State would sacrifice justice as well as 
liberty. There is neither equality nor fraternity 
in a state of Society in which the individual is 
denied his natural rights, and these the Socialist 
State does deny. 

The Socialist State organizes all the industries, 
employs all the workers, allots them their tasks, 
assigns them their wages, and divides to the 
members of the community the product of the 
labor. How shall this product be divided? Upon 
this question State Socialists are not agreed. 
But every scheme of division which they have 



124 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

proposed threatens to violate fundamental human 
rights. 

One scheme proposes as the principle of divi- 
sion, " From every man according to his ability, 
to every man according to his need." To so 
modern and clear-minded a writer as Morris 
Hillquit this appears to be the ideal. " To the 
Socialists/' he says, " the old communistic motto, 
' From each according to his ability, to each ac- 
cording to his needs/ generally appears as the 
ideal rule of distribution in an enlightened hu- 
man society, and quite likely the time will come 
when that high standard will be generally adopted 
by civilized communities. " l High standard of 
what? Social justice? No! That is a principle 
of generosity, not of justice. Justice requires 
that society should secure to me what is my own. 
Generosity pleads with me to use what is my 
own for the benefit of my less fortunate neigh- 
bor. For society to take from me the product of 
my labor and give it to one who is more needy 
than I am is neither justice nor generosity. 

What the individual produces by his unaided 
labor is his. It belongs to him because he has 
projected himself into it, and it is thus, as it were, 
a part of himself. The tailor makes two over- 
coats. They are his because they are the product 

1 Socialism in Theory and Practice, p. 117. 



POLITICAL SOCIALISM 125 

of his industry. He is wearing one and carrying 
the other over his arm when a strange man ap- 
proaches him and takes the second overcoat from 
him, saying, " I have no overcoat, you have two ; 
I will take the second overcoat from you on the 
principle ' From every man according to his abil- 
ity, to every man according to his need.' " That 
is highway robbery. Or the tailor hangs his two 
overcoats on the hat-tree in his hall. A man who 
has no overcoat creeps into the hall, takes one 
from the hat-tree and carries it off. He is acting 
on the principle " From every man according to 
his ability, to every man according to his need." 
That is thieving. Observe, I do not say that 
Political Socialism is either highway robbery or 
thieving ; I say that it has in it the same element 
of injustice in that it takes from the man his 
property without his consent and without com- 
pensation ; and that is always unjust. Or the • 
State comes into the tailor's house and takes 
one of his overcoats and gives it to his unpro- 
vided neighbor, and justifies the act by the 
motto, " From every man according to his ability, 
to every man according to his need." That is 
Political Socialism — in one of its forms. What 
I have produced by my labor no man, no body 
of men, no State, has a right to take from me 
without giving me adequate compensation for it. 



126 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

My Socialistic friend says, Does not the State 
take your property by taxation ? Yes, and it 
gives me the protection of a just Government in 
compensation. If it does not give me such pro- 
tection, then the State is a robber. Or he says : 
Does not the capitalist take the laborer's pro- 
duct, give him what the capitalist thinks, or ap- 
pears to think, is a just return for the labor, and 
keep the rest of the product for himself? Yes ! 
And that is the reason why I object to capitalism. 
And the injustice involved in the capitalist tak- 
ing the labor product, paying a wage for the la- 
bor, and appropriating the rest of the product as 
he thinks best is not cured by having the State 
take the labor product, pay a wage for the labor, 
and appropriate the rest as the State thinks best. 
A second method of distribution is thus stated 
by Annie Besant : — 

Since in public affairs ethics are apt to go to the wall 
and appeals to social justice too often fall on deaf ears, 
it is lucky that in this case ethics and convenience co- 
incide. The impossibility of estimating the separate 
value of each man's labor with any really valid result, 
the friction which would arise, the jealousies which 
would be provoked, the inevitable discontent, favorit- 
ism, and jobbery that would prevail : all these things 
will drive the Communal Council into the right path, 
equal remuneration for all workers. 1 

1 The Fabian Essays on Socialism, pp. 148, 149. 



POLITICAL SOCIALISM 127 

Annie Besant is not an authority on Socialism, 
and " equal remuneration for all workers " finds 
few advocates among Socialistic writers, though 
it is stated by Jessica Peixotto to be in the pro- 
gramme of the Modern French Socialists. 1 It is 
by no means certain that it would not find many 
advocates among the workers in a Socialist State. 
The fact that the somewhat similar motto, " Equal 
wages for equal work," — the equality of work 
being determined by the official position occu- 
pied and the hours spent, — was enthusiastically 
advocated as a principle of absolute justice by 
a large number of schoolteachers in New York 
City, is ominously significant. Whatever may be 
said of that motto, Mrs. Besant's " Equal remu- 
neration for all workers" is palpably unjust. 
The worker is entitled to be paid for his work 
according to the benefit which he confers, not 
according to the time during which he is em- 
ployed. The bank president's work is worth more 
to the community than the bank porter's work. 
Justice demands that each man should receive 
the product of his labor because it is his labor. 
If that is impossible, then he should receive its 
equivalent. 

1 " The average labor hour is the unit of value, and all distri- 
bution and exchange will take place on the basis of such a unit 
of value." — Jessica Peixotto, The French Revolution and Mod- 
ern French Socialism, p. 354. 



128 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

To secure to each worker such a just equiva- 
lent for his work some Socialists propose to con- 
stitute a Board or Council which would take all 
that is produced by the organized labor of the 
State, sell it, and divide the proceeds among the 
workingmen as the Board might deem equitable. 
The practical objections which Mrs. Besant tersely 
presents to that scheme, " the jealousies which 
would be provoked, the inevitable discontent, 
favoritism, and jobbery that would prevail," are 
impliedly recognized by other Socialistic writers. 
Mr. Edmond Kelly thinks that " it will be indis- 
pensable to submit these matters to an industrial 
parliament in which every industry will be repre- 
sented." ! He does not explain why it will be in- 
dispensable, but we may assume that his objec- 
tion to an administrative board is the one assigned 
by Mrs. Besant. But past political experience does 
not indicate that parliaments are immune from 
jealousies and jobbery. A principal objection to 
a protective tariff is the fact that the various in- 
terests represented in Congress struggle each for 
the largest possible share in the protection. One 
is appalled in imagining what would be the con- 
ditions in an industrial parliament whose main 
business it would be to divide the proceeds of 
the industry of the Socialist State among all 

1 Twentieth Century Soeialism, p. 305. 



POLITICAL SOCIALISM 129 

the officials and the workers in the socialized 
industry. 

Finally, some Socialistic writers pass by the 
question how the proceeds of industry shall be 
distributed in the Socialist State with the air of 
" we will cross that bridge when we come to it." 
But we have already come to it. It is the crux 
of the whole question. The only reason for any 
form of Socialism is the fact that under our pre- 
sent industrial system the rewards of labor are 
unevenly distributed. He who proposes to us a 
better system must make it clear to us that his 
proposal involves a better distribution. The whole 
labor problem is nothing else than this : How in 
organized industry should the product be shared 
by those who are engaged in it ? In our modern 
complicated society the laborer cannot avail him- 
self of the product of his labor. The chef in a 
hotel cannot eat all the food he cooks, the tailor 
cannot wear all the clothes he makes, the shoe- 
maker in a factory cannot use the eyeholes which 
he punches in the shoes for the shoe-strings, nor 
can the tanner use the skins which he cures. 
Since the workman cannot receive the product 
of his labor, justice demands that he should re- 
ceive the equivalent for that product. The labor 
problem reduced to its simplest terms is this : In 
what proportion should the value of an article 



130 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

made by a score of cooperating workers be divided 
among them? To give it all to the tool-owner 
and leave him to give what he will or what he 
can be made to give to the laborer is unjust. To 
require every man to contribute all he can and 
allow him to take only what he needs is unjust. 
To give an equal share to every worker regard- 
less of what he has produced is unjust. To unite 
all the workers in any community in one great 
industrial corporation, and to have a Board of 
Directors elected by the stockholders — that is, 
all the citizens in the community — to divide the 
product as they think best, is at least an attempt 
to secure justice. But past political experience 
does not justify the sanguine hopes of those who 
expect that it will in fact produce a just result. 

I do not object to Political or State Socialism 
because it is an impossible ideal ; I do not think 
that any true ideal is impossible. Whatever ought 
to be done can be done. My objection to State 
or Political Socialism is that it is not an ideal ; 
that it is the reverse of an ideal ; that it would 
be unjust and injurious to all concerned ; that it 
would take the community out of a rather un- 
comfortable frying-pan and put it into an intoler- 
ably hot fire. Whatever evils exist in the present 
industrial system — and I think there are such 
evils and that they are very great — will be cured, 



POLITICAL SOCIALISM 131 

not by a denial of the fundamental rights of 
men, but by a clear recognition and a better pro- 
tection of those rights ; not by the destruction 
of industrial liberty, but by the development of 
industrial liberty ; not by a continuance of the 
wages system with the State the only employer 
and all citizens wage-earners, but by the substi- 
tution for the wages system, in which a few men 
own the tools and implements of industry and 
the many work with them, a system of Indus- 
trial Democracy, in which the tool-owners will be 
workers, and the workers will be tool-owners ; a 
state of society in which the present division into 
two classes of capitalists and laborers will come 
to an end because the capitalists will become 
laborers and the laborers will become capitalists. 
One may call this Socialism if he will. But it is 
voluntary, not compulsory Socialism. It does not 
sacrifice individual liberty to organization, but 
makes organization at once the product and the 
instrument of individual liberty. 



CHAPTER IX 

INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 

The real and radical remedy for the evils of capi- 
talism is the organization of an industrial system 
in which the laborers, or tool-users, will them- 
selves become the capitalists, or tool-owners, — in 
which, therefore, the class distinction which exists 
under capitalism will be abolished. This is some- 
times called Socialism. Thus Mr. Thomas Kirkup, 
the author of the well-known article in the En- 
cyclopaedia Britannica on Socialism, defines the 
system in the following sentences : " Whereas in- 
dustry is at present carried on by private capital- 
ists served by wage-labor, it must in the future 
be conducted by associated or cooperating work- 
men jointly owning the means of production. We 
believe, on grounds both of theory and history, 
that this must be accepted as the cardinal prin- 
ciple of Socialism. . . . Against the evils arising 
from the practical and virtual monopoly of land 
and capital by the few, society would protect itself 
by a system of joint ownership of the means of 
production, and against the evils of unlimited 
competition, by the principle of associated labor 



INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 133 

systematically working for the general good." * 
It is evident, however, that this is something very 
different from Political Socialism, and Mr. Kirkup 
makes this distinction very clear in his volume. 
To avoid that confusion which inevitably arises 
from using the same word to distinguish two 
radically different systems, I call this phase of 
Socialism " Industrial Democracy." Let me first 
make the difference between the two systems 
clear to the reader. 

A great cotton factory employs, let us say, a 
thousand hands, and is owned jointly by a thou- 
sand stockholders. The stockholders own the 
tools and implements with which the business is 
carried on, the wage-earners are dependent on 
the consent of these stockholders for the right to 
carry on the business. It is evident that if the 
thousand employees should become the thousand 
stockholders, the factory would no longer be an 
autocratic institution ; it would be democratic. The 
workers with the tools would be the owners of 
the tools and would direct the management of the 
industry. It is also evident from history that 
State control is not the same as liberty, even 
though the State be democratic in its Constitu- 
tion. In England the State controls and, to some 
extent, supports the Church, but it is the churches 

1 An Inquiry into Socialism, p. 105. 



134 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

that are not owned or controlled by the State 
that are known as Free Churches. When in demo- 
cratic New England the Puritan State controlled 
the Church, when in democratic Virginia the 
Episcopal Church was controlled by the State, 
religion was not free. Freedom came when the 
Church was emancipated from control by the 
State, and those who worshiped in the Church 
were given control of the Church. Industry will 
not be made free by making the State the owner 
of the railways, the mines, and the factories. It 
will be made free when the men who work on the 
railways, in the mines, and in the factories own 
the tools and the implements of their industry; 
in other words, become the capitalists. 

Does the reader say, This is an unpractical 
ideal? I reply, that it is not only practical but 
practiced. It is not only possible for the same 
man to be capitalist and workingman, it is a com- 
mon experience. A concrete illustration helps to 
make clear a general principle. I have a little 
stock in The Outlook Publishing Company; to 
that extent I am a capitalist. I am one of the 
directors of The Outlook Publishing Company ; 
to that extent I am an employer of labor. I am 
a wage-earner in the Outlook Company ; so I be- 
long with the laboring classes. It is quite possi- 
ble that I might, as a wage-earner, desire a larger 



INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 135 

salary than I, as Director, think it prudent to give; 
but even in that case I could hardly get up a very 
serious quarrel with myself on the subject. Many 
of our bank presidents, railway officials, and fac- 
tory managers are capitalists, managers, and 
wage-earners. What I look forward to is the time 
coming when what is now the exception will be- 
come the rule ; when the great mass of wage- 
earners will become capitalists, and will, as capi- 
talists, elect the managers to direct the enterprises 
in which they are engaged. When my friend says 
to me, That is an impossible dream, I reply, 
Nothing is impossible that is right. More than 
that, I can see in the history about me move- 
ments that are tending to this consummation. 
Those movements wise men will endeavor to 
guide, perhaps to expedite, but not to halt or 
hinder. 

We are beginning to see that the common peo- 
ple are already capitalists if their rights are ac- 
corded to them. A commonwealth owns wealth 
in common. A first step toward industrial de- 
mocracy is securing to the common people this 
wealth which by right belongs to them. 

It must be nearly forty years ago that Senator 
Booth, of California, put the railway problem in a 
sentence : Formerly the means of locomotion were 
poor and the highways were public property; 



136 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

now the means of locomotion are admirable and 
the highways are private property. We have com- 
paratively recently discovered that the highways 
ought not to be private property ; that if they 
are operated as private property for private inter- 
ests, public interests are sure to suffer. Since this 
book was commenced the railways have practi- 
cally agreed with the President of the United 
States that in the future the alteration in the 
rates which they charge for carrying freight and 
passengers over these highways shall be sub- 
mitted to, and approved by, the Government — 
that is, by representatives of the people of the 
United States — before the change is put in op- 
eration. The railways themselves have come to 
see that it is not even for the interest of the own- 
ers of the property that it shall be operated under 
purely private direction and for purely private 
interests. 

It does not follow that because the highways 
of right belong to the people that the people 
must manage them. The Constitution provides 
that the United States shall have power "to coin 
money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign 
coin." The United States has delegated to pri- 
vate banks the right to issue the currency on 
which the people depend for their interchange of 
commodities — in other words, to manage the 



INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 137 

banking ; but it has brought these private banks 
under such Governmental control that they are 
operated for the benefit of the public, and the 
value of the money which they issue is as secure 
as if it were issued by the Government itself. 
Thus in our banking we have a combination of 
private interests and public regulation cooperating 
to promote the public welfare. It is not only en- 
tirely conceivable but highly probable that we can 
work out in somewhat similar fashion a method 
by which the railways will be operated by private 
enterprise under Governmental regulation so as 
to promote the interests both of the private own- 
ers and the public users of the highways. What- 
ever may be the solution of the problem, we have 
already reached the conclusion that the public has 
a quasi ownership in the public highways, or, at 
least, that right of regulation and control which 
we are accustomed to connect with ownership. 

In a previous chapter I have insisted that every 
individual is justly entitled to the product of his 
labor. He is not justly entitled to anything but 
the product of his labor, except as he derives his 
title thereto from the voluntary act of the com- 
munity. He is not entitled to ownership in the 
sunshine, or the air, or the ocean, or the navi- 
gable rivers. This is universally conceded. He 
has no more .right to private ownership in the 



138 THE SPIRIT OP DEMOCRACY 

unnavigable rivers than in the rivers that are 
navigable ; no more right in the soil and its con- 
tents than in the ocean and its contents. What- 
ever rights to navigable rivers and the soil he 
possesses he has derived, not from his own ex- 
ertions, but from the action of the community 
to which the soil and the rivers belong. This is 
not the affirmation of a radical or Socialistic re- 
former, it is the affirmation of English and Amer- 
ican law. For the convenience of the reader I 
will turn here, not to the law books, but to the 
encyclopaedias, which give in compact form the 
principles laid down in the law books : — 

There is no such thing as absolute property in land, 
says the chief English writer on that subject ; a man 
can only have an estate or interest in land. Every 
landowner, in the popular sense of the phrase, is, in 
the eyes of the law, a tenant only; and such is the 
case with the largest and most unlimited interests 
known to the law — that of an estate in fee simple. 
The owner in fee is the tenant of some one else, who, 
in his turn, is the tenant of another, and so on, until 
the last and only absolute owner is reached, viz., the 
King, from whom directly or indirectly all lands are 
held. 1 

This principle is equally recognized in Ameri- 
can law : — 

1 Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Feudalism," p. 107. 



INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 139 

Personal property was left, as in other legal systems, 
subject to ownership in the full sense of that term. 
But real property could only be "held" of some one 
else and in subordination to the rights of a superior 
holder. We have, therefore, landholders, not land- 
owners. The distinction is of fundamental and far- 
reaching importance. The only owner of the land is 
the King, the State. The subject can have at most an 
estate in it, i. e., a status with reference to it. The 
greatest estate possible — the pure fee simple absolute 
— is less than complete ownership, being a derivative 
and subordinate right, subject to the superior claims 
of him — whether a private person or the State — of 
whom the land is held. Property in land, therefore, is 
not the land itself, but an estate of longer or shorter 
duration in the land, together with certain rights of 
use and enjoyment. 

Nor are these mere statements of abstract and 
unpractical principles. In fact, all land titles in 
America are derived from the original owner, 
the Government. Land titles in the East are 
largely derived from Colonial grants by the King, 
who represented the people of Great Britain ; 
land titles in the West from National grants by 
the Federal Government, which also represented 
the people. The people were the landowners, and 
they still retain in Great Britain, and in all the 
States of the Union, a certain indefinable interest 
in the land, and of this legal interest they avail 



140 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

themselves in such public acts as the taking o£ 
real estate for a public park or a National high- 
way, not at the price for which the owner chooses 
to sell it, but at the price which the State thinks 
it right to pay. 

At the present time the people of the United 
States still own, absolutely and unquestionably 
own, millions of acres of land which they have 
never granted to private parties. Of this land 
they are both the owners and the holders. Some 
of it is forest lands containing valuable tim- 
ber ; some of it mining lands containing gold, 
or silver, or copper, or iron; some of it coal 
lands; and some of it, at present, unfertile lands 
which depend for their fertility on either irri- 
gation or drainage. The people of the United 
States have recently waked up to the fact that 
they are immense landowners, and are consider- 
ing the question how they can make this owner- 
ship most profitable to themselves. Mr. Roosevelt 
was not the first to discover this land ownership, 
or to speak of it, but he has spoken of it in 
such a way that the whole Nation has listened. 
In his address at Jamestown, Virginia, June 10, 
1907, he put the whole so-called Conservation 
problem in a sentence, as " the question of utiliz- 
ing the natural resources of the Nation in a way 
that will be of the most benefit to the Nation as 



INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 141 

a whole." Whether the Nation shall, through 
National agents, cut down the forest trees and 
sell the timber, open the mines and extract the 
gold and silver and copper and iron, operate the 
coal mines, and retain the ownership of the 
reclaimed agricultural lands and rent them to 
farmers ; or whether it shall pursue some other 
method of utilizing the natural resources of the 
Nation in a way that will be of the most benefit 
to the Nation as a whole, is a question which I 
need not discuss here. Personally, I believe that 
those results will be best utilized for the benefit of 
the Nation as a whole by the combination of pri- 
vate enterprise and public oversight, such as we 
have already proved practicable in the case of the 
banks, and are proving practicable in the case of 
the railways. But all I am interested in doing 
here is to point out to the reader that because 
the people of the United States own these forest 
lands, mining lands, coal lands, and agricultural 
lands, they are already large capitalists. Conser- 
vation means that they shall not put this capital 
up to be raffled for and seized upon by the most 
enterprising, energetic, and perhaps unscrupulous. 
In addition, many millions of acres of land 
which formerly belonged to the people of the 
United States have been given away or sold for 
a song, and are now owned by private parties. 



142 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

But recur to the statement in the American En- 
cyclopaedia : u The greatest estate possible — the 
pure fee simple absolute — is less than complete 
ownership " ; or recur to the statement in the 
Encyclopaedia Britannica : " Every landowner, in 
the popular sense of the phrase, is, in the eye of 
the law, a tenant only." According, then, to the 
recognized principles of law as epitomized in these 
two encyclopaedias, the people of the United 
States, or, under our Constitution, of the indi- 
vidual States, have some interest in the lands 
which have passed into private ownership. It 
was the discovery, or the invention, of Henry 
George, though in a sense he derived it from ear- 
lier writers, that the people of the State already 
collected some portion of this interest by the 
taxes which they levied on the land, and it was 
his proposition that in the future the people of 
the State should practically claim the rights of 
landlord which the law theoretically declared that 
they possessed, and should levy on the land a tax 
equivalent to a fair rental. This rental would be 
for the land only, not for the houses and barns 
which had been built upon it, nor for the or- 
chards which had been planted, nor for the crops 
which had been raised ; because the houses, and 
barns, and orchards, and crops are the product of 
private industry, and therefore are private pro- 



INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 143 

perty. The rental would be adjusted to the value 
of the land in its natural state, Mr. Thomas G. 
Shearman, in his work on " Natural Taxation/' 
has made a careful estimate for the purpose of 
showing that if such a ground rent were collected 
from the unimproved land, based on its valuation 
as unimproved, it would be more than sufficient 
to pay all National and local taxes and still leave 
a considerable margin to the landholders. 1 

While we are thus coming to realize that we 
are already capitalists, that we have a right of 
quasi ownership in the railways, and unlimited 
ownership in millions of acres of valuable land, 
and a landlord's interest in many millions more, 
we are also beginning to acquire ability to co- 
operate in the management of great estates by 
means of voluntary organizations. These volun- 
tary organizations are called corporations. A cor- 
poration, in its modern form, is a democratic con- 
trivance by which a number of property-owners 
put their property together for the sake of se- 
curing greater efficiency in administration, and 
divide the profits of the enterprise between them 

1 Thomas G. Shearman, Natural Taxation, chap, x, p. 147: 
" Thus all national and local taxes, if collected exclusively from 
ground rents, would absorb only 44^ per cent of those rents, 
leaving to the owners of the bare land a clear annual rent of 
$763,252,000, besides the absolutely untaxed income from all build- 
ings and improvements upon their land," 



144 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

in proportion to their respective investments. It 
is thus a contrivance for both the concentration 
and the distribution of wealth. It is concentra- 
tion in work; it is distribution in enjoyment. 
Silas Marner could in a lifetime lay by enough 
out of his scant wages to buy a single loom with 
which to earn his daily bread ; but no man can 
in a single lifetime lay by, out of the profits of 
his unaided industry, money enough to buy a 
great woolen mill. Therefore, a number of men 
unite, each paying his share, conduct the woolen 
mill, and divide the profits of the organized 
weaving. There is thus ready to the hands of the 
Silas Marners a means for cooperation, for each 
one of them can own a share in the common tool 
which they combine to operate, and so share in 
the product of their cooperative industry. The 
larger the corporation and the greater the num- 
ber of stockholders, the better chance there is 
for Silas Marner to become a stockholder. Three 
conditions are necessary to enable him to become 
thus a part owner with his fellow-laborer in the 
tools which they are using in their joint indus- 
try : honest administration of the corporation ; 
facility for investment in its property; means 
with which to make the investment. 

It is first necessary that the corporation should 
be administered honestly ; that is, in the interest 



INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 145 

of the owners, not in the special interests of the 
directors and managers. It cannot be doubted 
that our standards of commercial honesty are im- 
proving in America. Operations which twenty- 
five years ago men admired as shrewd they now 
denounce as dishonest. For operations like those 
which netted millions of dollars to the operators 
years ago, men are now serving their time under 
criminal sentence in the State's prison. This 
gradual improvement in the standards of honesty 
has been accompanied with a demand for closer 
Governmental inspection of the great corpora- 
tions. The corporation tax law, recently passed by 
Congress, compels the corporations to file their 
financial reports at Washington, where they will 
be subjected to the inspection of the parties 
interested. We no longer think that men may 
issue stock to represent their property in any 
amount and sell it at any price they please. Some 
States have already enacted [laws against stock- 
watering. Congress has failed to enact the law 
which was proposed to prevent the stock- water- 
ing of corporations engaged in interstate com- 
merce; but we may be pretty sure that a future 
session will enact it. If I own a horse worth 
$100, and offer it to my neighbor for $250, 
there is nothing dishonest in the transaction, if 
it is not accompanied with false statements, 



146 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

expressed or implied. But if I divide the horse 
ownership into twenty-five shares of $10 each, 
and sell the stock to my church for $250, and 
the church transforms the shares into $20 each, 
and raffles the horse at a church fair for $500, 
somebody is cheated. The defense made on stock- 
watering is that it anticipates the future value 
of the property. If it is a colt worth $100 that 
is thus raffled for at $500, the transaction is still 
dishonest. The property of a corporation should 
be estimated at its present real value, not at its 
imagined future value, and it should be so or- 
ganized and operated that every workingman 
can put his savings into its stock with as much 
safety as he now puts them into a savings bank. 
Not only honesty in administration of the cor- 
poration, however, is necessary, but also facility 
for investment in its property. The workingman 
must have a fair chance to buy the stock in an 
honestly managed corporation. Corporations are 
beginning to see that it is for their interest to 
have the workingmen co-capitalists ; they are be- 
ginning to open the door to capitalistic partici- 
pation with them. The most striking illustration 
of this is furnished by the United States Steel 
Corporation, nearly half of whose workingmen 
are shareholders. In the proportion in which 
workingmen become owners of stock they become 



INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 147 

owners of the tools with which their industry is 
carried on. Just in that proportion the class divi- 
sion into laborers and capitalists begins to disap- 
pear. 

But the workingman must not only be sure 
that the corporation is honestly managed, and is 
therefore a safe investment, and must not only 
have the opportunity for purchasing stock and 
so becoming a shareholder, he must have also 
the means with which to purchase. It is reported 
by the Comptroller of the Currency that there 
were in 1909 nearly nine million depositors in the 
savings banks of the United States who owned 
therein $3,713,405,709. A considerable propor- 
tion of these depositors are wage-earners ; they 
belong to the creditor class ; they are capitalists 
loaning their capital through the savings banks 
to the managers of great enterprises. When the 
great enterprises are so honestly managed that 
stock in the enterprise is as safe as a deposit in 
the savings bank, many of these savings-bank 
depositors will become shareholders in the enter- 
prise which, by their work, they are carrying on. 
When every post-office in the United States be- 
comes a savings bank, and it is as easy for the 
workingman to deposit his money with his Gov- 
ernment for safe-keeping as it is now for him 
to send a registered letter, we may reasonably 



148 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

expect that the savings will be greatly increased 
— an expectation which is abundantly justified 
by the history of other countries. The anti-saloon 
wave which is springing up over the country at 
the present time gives further justification for 
this faith in the economic future of the common 
people of America. For this movement is, in part 
at least, an economic one ; a protest against the 
waste involved in the drink traffic ; a protest 
against a traffic which produces, as has been well 
said, not public wealth, but public illth. 

A right to labor and an opportunity to labor 
are barren rights without capacity to labor. He 
who can contribute to the world's wealth only 
the product of muscular toil contributes very 
little. For science has learned how to set nature's 
forces to work, and the muscles of man compete 
at great disadvantage with the muscles of nature. 
That is not a healthy individual who labors only 
with his hands while his brain lies fallow, nor is 
he healthy who labors only with his brain while 
his hands are idle. The brain and the muscle 
were given by the Creator to the same man that 
he might use them both. To divide society into 
brain- workers and hand-toilers is to make a social 
order contrary to nature. This we are beginning 
to see. Very slowly and afar off we are follow- 
ing Germany, whose recent unexampled indus- 



INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 149 

trial development is partly due to her recogni- 
tion of the value of industrial education, which 
occupies in her system equal place with literary 
education. When our educational processes, in- 
tellectual and moral, equip as thoroughly and as 
broadly for so-called industrial as for so-called 
professional pursuits, we shall give to working- 
men that equality of capacity which is really es- 
sential to equality of opportunity. The progress 
which we have made and are making in this di- 
rection is one of the hopeful signs of the times. 
In my college days there was not, I believe, an 
engineering school in the country, and there was 
practically no laboratory work in the colleges. 
Now in all our more progressive communities 
there is the industrial as well as the literary 
High School. Thus democratic America is, in 
spite of some opposition and more indifference, 
gradually abolishing what is called the proleta- 
riat, by giving to all men the opportunity and 
developing in all men the capacity, intellectual 
and moral, to be sharers in the wealth of the 
community. 

While in the corporations men are learning to 
cooperate on the basis of mutual trust and con- 
fidence in great industrial enterprises, in labor 
unions men who live chiefly by the industry of 
their hands are learning how to cooperate on the 



150 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

basis of their avowed motto, " An injury to one 
is an injury to all; and a benefit to one is a 
benefit to all." I have no space here to discuss at 
any length the debit and credit side of the labor 
union. It has its evils, and some of them have 
been very serious. But it has taught working- 
men to cooperate in a common movement for 
the common good ; it has compelled capitalists 
to pay respect to workingmen because they have 
become a force that must be reckoned with ; it 
has made workingmen, in a small way, capitalists 
by contributing to the common fund, which has 
sometimes reached considerable proportions ; it 
has won for the workingman shorter hours, bet- 
ter wages, and improved conditions which other- 
wise he would not have obtained ; and, by train- 
ing in habits of cooperation and combination, it 
has laid the foundation for a future perfected 
industrial democracy. Perhaps the most valuable 
contribution to industrial democracy made by 
the trade unions is the increased respect for the 
workingmen which they have won from the em- 
ployers. For in democracy good will is of little 
value unless it is founded on respect. So far from 
promoting future class war, by the power to wage 
successful war which these organizations have 
created, they have laid solid foundations for 
future and final industrial peace 



INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 151 

Conservation, the single tax, the growth of 
corporations, the beginnings of profit-sharing 
through stockholding, the development of the 
industrial virtues, — thrift and temperance, — 
and of industrial intelligence, and the growth 
of labor unions, are unconsciously cooperating 
movements toward industrial democracy. The 
progress which has been made in the last quar- 
ter-century is little realized even by students of 
economic life. It does not come within the scope 
of this book to enter upon a balancing of statis- 
tics. I believe, however, in spite of some indica- 
tions to the contrary, that we are living in an age 
of increasing distribution of wealth; that the 
statement of Edward Bernstein is abundantly 
justified : " The number of the possessing classes 
is to-day not smaller but larger. The enormous 
increase of social wealth is not accompanied by a 
decreasing number of large capitalists but by an 
increasing number of capitalists of all degrees." l 
The French Revolution broke up the great feudal 
estates of France into small holdings. The recent 
land legislation of Great Britain is producing the 
same effect, at least in Ireland. The Civil War has 
had a similar tendency in the South, and I am 
informed on very good authority that recently 
emancipated negroes now own a total amount of 

1 Evolutionary Socialism, Introduction, p. xi. 



152 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

land equal in area to the whole of the New Eng- 
land States. I have already pointed out the fact 
that the corporation makes possible the division 
of industrial wealth among a large number of 
owners, and Mr. Edward Bernstein and Mr. 
Charles B. Spahr have shown that this division 
is actually taking place. Recent legislation and 
recent court decisions point out to us how we 
can redistribute the wealth which has been con- 
centrated in too few hands and how we can 
prevent such concentration in the future. The 
Courts have held that a progressive inheritance 
tax is constitutional ; so eminent a capitalist as 
Mr. Andrew Carnegie has commended it as in- 
herently just and wise. By such a tax we may 
take from the estate of the multi-millionaire a 
considerable proportion of the amount of wealth 
which has really been created largely by the com- 
munity, and can return it to the community 
again. These great accumulations have been for 
the most part made by railways and by land 
operations. We can bring, and we are bringing, 
the railways under such Governmental control as 
will make them, after paying a reasonable tax to 
the owners, give the remainder of their profits 
to the public, either through a franchise tax or 
through lower rates, and both methods have been 
declared constitutional by the Courts. What the 



INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 153 

Courts have declared legal the conscience of the 
best and ablest of the railway managers is be- 
ginning to recognize as just. Said Mr. William 
Henry Baldwin, Jr. : " The exact fair cost should 
be capitalized, and after capital has had its fair 
return and business efficiency is maintained, the 
surplus is to go where it belongs, to the public." * 

We can collect a rental in the form of a tax 
for the landowner (the public) from the land- 
holder, and in the form of a royalty on all tim- 
ber cut and all minerals extracted from the soil ; 
and England's recent Budget is a movement, 
and a successful movement, in this direction. We 
can prevent stock-watering, and can discourage, 
if we cannot altogether prevent, stock-gambling ; 
and the recent legislation against other forms of 
gambling, and the increasing popular condemna- 
tion of gambling in all its forms, give reasonable 
hope of a time when the attempt to get some- 
thing for nothing, whatever form it takes, will 
be accounted as immoral, even if it cannot by 
law be made as criminal, as theft, forgery, and 
embezzlement. 

Said Abraham Lincoln in 1861 : " Labor is 
prior to and independent of capital. Capital is 
only the fruit of labor, and could never have 
existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the 

1 J. G. Brooks, An American Citizen, p. 126. 



154 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

superior of capital and deserves much the higher 
consideration. Capital has its rights which are as 
worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is 
it denied that there is, and probably always will be, 
a relation between labor and capital producing 
mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that 
the whole labor of the community exists within 
that relation. . . . There is not of necessity any 
such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed 
to that condition of life. Many independent men 
everywhere in these States a few years back in 
their lives were hired laborers. The prudent pen- 
niless beginner in the world labors for wages a 
while, and at length hires another new beginner 
to help him. This is the just and generous and 
prosperous system which opens the way to all — 
gives hope to all, and consequently energy and 
progress and improvement of condition to all." 

In these sentences Abraham Lincoln points 
the way toward the solution of our labor problem. 
What many independent men have done as indi- 
viduals in transferring themselves from the labor- 
ing class without capital to the capitalistic class, 
yet still continuing their labor, I hope to see la- 
borers as a class do for themselves. I hope to see 
a state of society in which there will be few or no 
capitalists who do not have to labor, and few or 
no laborers who are compelled to remain all their 



INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 155 

lives without becoming capitalists ; a state of so- 
ciety in which no man will live on the fruits of 
another man's labor, and no man will be denied 
the fruits of his own labor. This is what I mean 
by industrial democracy. More specifically, it 
means the universal diffusion of the economic 
virtues — temperance, honesty, and truth ; the 
cooperation of the head and hands in an indus- 
trial partnership ; a just and equitable division of 
the products of their joint industry between the 
tool-owners and the tool-users ; a fair opportunity 
for the tool-user to become part owner of the 
tools that he labors with ; growing cooperation 
between the laborer and the capitalist, or the tool- 
user and the tool-owner, in both ownership of the 
tool and the direction of the industry ; and a 
frank recognition of the fundamental truth that 
every individual is entitled to the product of his 
individual industry, to a just proportion of the 
product which in joint industry he has helped to 
create, and to a participation in that common 
wealth which, being produced by no individual 
industry, belongs of right to the entire commu- 
nity. Democracy appears to me to be slowly but 
surely coming to a recognition of these principles. 
In the recognition of these principles and their 
incorporation in the industrial life of the com- 
munity is the solution of our labor problem. 



CHAPTER X 

THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF GOVERNMENT 

In November, 1909, three hundred miners were 
entombed in a mine at Cherry, near Spring Val- 
ley, Illinois, for a week. The living were here 
imprisoned with the dead. At the end of that 
time twenty-two miners were rescued alive. They 
had kept themselves free from the fatal gas by 
building a barricade. Saved from death by suffo- 
cation, they were threatened with death by thirst. 
Two of these men, self-constituted leaders by 
virtue of their character, gave orders for the pro- 
tection of the little community. They directed 
that the three members of the party who were 
sick should have the first chance at the little 
pools of water that were in the depressions that 
had been scooped out of the veins of coal. Against 
these orders some of the men revolted, and one 
was discovered stealing water from one of the 
sick miners. He was seized by the guard whom 
the self-constituted leaders had appointed and, 
after a struggle, was felled to the ground and 
made a prisoner. 

Such is always the origin of government. For 






ORIGIN AND NATURE OF GOVERNMENT 157 

the protection of the community some man, or some 
body o£ men, exercise control, to which usually 
the majority yield willing obedience, and, if the 
government is successful, the minority an unwill- 
ing obedience. This government is always based 
upon power. A command is not a command unless 
there is power to enforce it. Without such power 
it is only advice. When one man, or a group of 
men, get such control in a community that they 
can make the rest obey their commands, there is 
the beginning of government ; and all govern- 
ments in the history of the world have begun in 
this way. Parental government is no exception 
to this fundamental principle. In the well-ordered 
family the child obeys the requirements of his 
parents because they are his parents and have a 
right to demand submission to their authority, as 
in a well-ordered State the citizens obey the gov- 
ernment because it is the government and has a 
right to demand submission to its authority. 

This government may be that of one strong 
man ruling over the rest, in which case it is an 
autocracy ; it may be a small body of men, or class 
of men, ruling over the rest, then it is an oli- 
garchy ; it may be the many ruling over the rest, 
then it is a democracy. But it is not a govern- 
ment at all unless the ruler, be he one, few, or 
many, has a recognized authority to issue com- 



158 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

mands and power to enforce obedience to them. 
This power may be that of an armed force, then 
the government is a military government ; it may 
be a traditional or inherited power exercised by 
a class and resting upon tradition, then it is an 
hereditary aristocracy ; it may be that of a se- 
lected body of office-holders intrusted by long 
custom with practically irresponsible power, then 
it is a bureaucracy ; it may be the power of con- 
centrated wealth exercised through political forms 
that may be either monarchic, oligarchic, aristo- 
cratic, or democratic. Then, whatever the politi- 
cal forms, the government is a plutocracy. 

To these historic forms of government our 
fathers attempted to add another — self-govern- 
ment. It was founded upon three fundamental 
principles, the truth of which was tacitly assumed 
rather than explicitly expressed. They were : — 

First, that the mass of men are better able to 
govern themselves than the few are to govern 
them ; that the perils from the ignorance of the 
governed are less than the perils from the selfish- 
ness of the governors. 

Second, that therefore men should be left free 
to manage their own affairs, and only their own 
affairs; that therefore each man should govern 
himself in respect to those things that concern 
only himself, and each community should govern 






ORIGIN AND NATURE OF GOVERNMENT 159 

itself in those things which concern only itself. 
Hence grew up local self-government and the 
Federal system : the town government for the 
town, the municipal government for the city, 
the county government for the county, the State 
government for the State, and, finally, the Fed- 
eral Government for those National interests 
which concern the people of all the towns, cities, 
counties, and States. Hence the provision of the 
Constitution that " the powers not delegated to 
the United States by the Constitution, nor pro- 
hibited by it to the States, are reserved to the 
States respectively, or to the people." * 

Third, that men are not born able to govern 
themselves as fish are to swim, or birds are to fly, 
but that all men have a dominant capacity for 
self-government ; that they must be, and they can 
be, educated ; hence the public-school system. 

Thus was the new Nation born, inspired by a 
new ideal, and founded on a new political faith 
— faith in humanity. 

But it needed education in a school of conflict. 
The Declaration of Independence was deemed, 
both in the South and in the North, to be appli- 
cable only to the white race. Slavery, which both 

1 It is true that this is a subsequent Amendment to the Con- 
stitution, but there is no doubt that it expresses the spirit of the 
original document, and of those who framed that document. 



v^ 




160 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

in the South and in the North our fathers ex- 
pected would gradually disappear, grew with our 
growth and strengthened with our strength. It 
created in the South what may be called a feudal 
democracy, a type of aristocracy existing under 
democratic forms. The war between the two 
ideals of political life, the Southern and the 
Northern, established for the Republic two prin- 
ciples : first, the doctrine that all governments 
exist for the benefit of the governed is as appli- 
cable to the government of the negro as to the 
government of the white man ; second, a gov- 
ernment founded on self-government is not weak 
but strong — strong enough to meet successfully 
what was perhaps the greatest revolt against 
government which the world has ever seen. This 
war at home was followed by one between auto- 
cracy and democracy, between the Land of the 
Inquisition and the Land of the Public School. 
As the Confederates had established the power 
of the Federal Government within the borders of 
the Republic, so the Spanish War established the 
power of the Federated Republic among the gov- 
ernments of the world. If it did not make the 
Republic a world power, it at least won for that 
world power a world recognition. 

Meanwhile, the country has grown with un- 
recedented growth in territory from thirteen 



ORIGIN AND NATURE OF GOVERNMENT 161 

feeble colonies along the Atlantic Coast to a Re- 
public overspreading half a continent ; in popu- 
lation from three or four millions to eighty 
millions ; in wealth from poverty to one of the 
richest communities in the world. Its educational 
equipment includes a public-school system which 
is certainly the largest, and, unless Germany be 
an exception, the best in Christendom, supple- 
mented by private schools, colleges, universities, 
and professional schools not surpassed by any in 
the world; its material equipment of railway, 
telegraph, telephone, and the like puts it among 
the foremost nations in the march of human pro- 
gress ; its moral ideals, exemplified in its various 
social and educational reforms, and in its free 
institutions of religion, prove the self-educative 
value of self-government; and its international 
influence is seen in the effect of its ideals and 
institutions upon other lands, which have adopted 
since the birth of America its representative 
houses of Legislature, its popular suffrage, its 
public schools, its free assemblies, and its free 
press. 

Meanwhile, this ideal of self-government has 
been undergoing a change which is none the less 
revolutionary because it has been growth, and 
hence unconscious ; a change from a government 
of self-governing individuals into a self-govern- 



162 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

ing community. We have learned that the inter- 
est of the whole is more than the sum of the 
interests of all the individuals ; and that the in- 
terests of all individuals can only be secured by 
their common recognition of the interest of the 
whole. Some of the changes which have taken 
place in my own lifetime may serve to illustrate 
this peaceful revolution. 

The private penny posts which were once 
operated in some of our great cities exist no 
longer; all epistolary communications between the 
members of this great community are conveyed 
for them by their Federal Government. The 
banking, which was at first a purely private enter- 
prise, is a purely private enterprise no longer ; 
as one great financier once said to me, "the 
United States is the greatest banking concern in 
the world " ; and all so-called private banks are so 
brought into affiliation with the United States 
Government and under its regulation and control 
that the whole banking system possesses a real, 
though not a strictly organic unity. Our high- 
ways, because of the invention of steam and rail- 
ways, are no longer open highways on which each 
man is free to travel when and as he will, but are 
great enterprises carried on by combinations be- 
tween labor and capital, and now under Govern- 
ment control, which, there is reason to believe, 



ORIGIN AND NATURE OF GOVERNMENT 163 

will make sure that their operation shall be for 
the equal benefit of the entire community. The 
public-school system has not only extended over 
the whole Nation, as it did not at first, but has 
undertaken all forms of education from the kin- 
dergarten to the university, and is accompanied 
by public libraries in practically all centres of 
population. The public health is seen to be some- 
thing more than the health of individuals, or, at 
least, it is seen that the health of individuals can- 
not be secured by individualistic enterprise. We 
have, therefore, Health Boards, beginning in our 
great cities, extending throughout our States, 
and now, unless I am greatly mistaken, soon to 
be organized in a bureau of the Federal Govern- 
ment, for the purpose of compelling obedience to 
sanitary law and stamping out epidemics. Even 
our amusements and recreations are made a pub- 
lic concern, and in our cities, towns, and even 
smaller villages, parks are provided, playgrounds 
for the children, and bands of music for the sum- 
mer evenings. In some cases these are provided 
by political organizations, in others by voluntary 
organization, but in either case by a common and 
cooperative effort. 

These changes have been accompanied by 
another change. The increasing complexity of 
modern civilization forces upon us, whether we 



164 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

will or no, an increasing complexity in our gov- 
ernment. The prime function of government is 
to protect persons and property, and the four 
fundamental rights of persons and property have 
never been better defined than in the four moral 
laws of the Ten Commandments : Thou shalt not 
kill, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt 
not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness. The 
enforcement of these laws in a modern com- 
munity with the heterogeneous population which 
America contains means something very different 
from the enforcement of these laws in the wilder- 
ness, where they were first proclaimed. 

The law, Thou shalt not kill, means not only 
adequate protection of the individual from the 
assassin or the mob, and of the free laborer from 
the pistol, the dynamite, or the savage blow of 
the striking laborer or his ally ; it means super- 
vision by the Government of our food-supplies to 
prevent adulterations perilous to health ; protec- 
tion of the life of little children from the greed 
which sends them into life-destroying industries ; 
protection of the wives and mothers from insistent 
demands of industry which destroy their mother- 
hood and rob their children and their husbands of 
their care and companionship'; from the peril to 
life involved in tenement-house sweat-shops; from 
the corrupting of our water-supply by turning our 



ORIGIN AND NATURE OF GOVERNMENT 165 

rivers into open sewers; from the carelessness of 
railway management, which in one year destroyed 
more lives in America than were destroyed in 
the Russian army by the Battle of Mukden, the 
greatest battle of modern times ; and from the 
reckless driving of automobiles, of whose death- 
list there is no census. Malice slays our hun- 
dreds, greed our thousands, carelessness our tens 
of thousands. It is the duty of a competent and 
efficient government to save life from all three 
of these assassins. 

The law, Thou shalt not commit adultery, is not 
adequately enforced by setting husband or wife 
free from the marital relation when its law is 
violated. What havoc in human health, what evils 
inflicted upon innocent women and children, are 
due to the violation of this law physicians have 
long known, and the public is beginning to know. 
Monsters in human form, such as the grotesque 
fancies of a Dickens or a Shakespeare creating a 
Quilp or a Caliban have never equaled, exist in 
American society, carrying on a white slave trade 
so horrible in its details that reputable men and 
women have been unable to believe that it could 
be true. Nor will our Government, Federal or 
State, have fulfilled its duty in the enforcement 
of this primitive legislation, Thou shalt not com- 
mit adultery, until our legislators realize, as they 



166 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

have not in the past, how openly it is violated 
and how great is the almost epidemic evil which 
such violations inflict upon the Nation. 

Thou shalt not steal, means thou shalt not take 
from thy neighbor without giving him a just 
equivalent; it means protection of the ignorant 
from the wiles of the professional gambler ; pro- 
tection of the innocent and helpless stockholder 
from the chicanery of the stock gambler ; protec- 
tion of the insured and of the bank depositor from 
the tricks and devices of the dishonest financier; 
protection of the owners from the schemes of the 
railway wrecker ; and the protection of the public 
interest in the public property from the shrewd 
devices of men who are eager to acquire wealth 
without the labor of producing it. 

The law, Thou shalt not bear false witness, 
means prosecution and punishment of the press 
which violates this law, whether it does so with 
malicious intent or from mere careless money- 
making greed. The freedom of the press no more 
means freedom to do what one likes with his pen 
than freedom of action means that he may do 
what he likes with his hand. If I put my hand 
into my neighbor's pocket and abstract his purse, 
I am presently carried off to the police station, 
because I have violated my neighbor's right of 
property ; if I use my pen to vilify my neighbor, 




ORIGIN AND NATURE OF GOVERNMENT 167 

or, with absolute carelessness of his rights and 
my obligations, print untrue and sensational gos- 
sip about him, I ought to go into the same prison- 
house and occupy the same cell with him who has 
robbed his neighbor of his purse. A newspaper 
has no more right to despoil one of his repu- 
tation than a thief has a right to despoil one of 
his property. The robber of reputation is the 
more despicable criminal of the two. Freedom 
of the press means that the newspaper may print 
what it will without submitting beforehand its 
matter to a governmental censor. It does not mean 
that it may print what it will without being re- 
sponsible afterwards for its falsehoods if it prints , 
hat is not true. \ 

Thus in two ways the function of government 
has greatly increased within the last century. It 
has increased because the elementary rights of 
men are more complex in our complex civiliza- 
tion, and the laws for their protection must there- 
fore be more complex. It has also increased 
because we have discovered that many of our 
fundamental rights, such as our right to go from 
one part to another of our Republic, our right to 
be preserved from the contagious disease of a 
careless neighbor, our right to have our children 
protected from the corrupting influence of se- 
ductive vice, our right to have them given such 



168 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

education as will give them a fair opportunity for 
a useful and happy life, can be protected only 
by competent and cooperative action through 
government. Both causes have contributed to our 
growing realization of the truth that a self- 
governing community is something very different 
from a community of self-governing individuals. 
Many in our times look with apprehension 
upon this rapid extension of the function and 
powers of government. We are departing, they 
say, from the traditions of our fathers ; and they 
are right. We are compelled to depart from the 
traditions of our fathers. They traveled in stage- 
coaches, we travel in Pullman cars ; they com- 
municated by mail, we increasingly communicate 
by telegraph and telephone ; they used coin as a 
medium of exchange, or bank-bills at their own 
risk, we use bank-bills without any risk ; they suf- 
fered from devastating epidemics, we are pro- 
tecting ourselves from devastating epidemics by 
Governmental regulation; they burned candles or 
whale oil, we illuminate our houses by kerosene 
or electricity; they had few books and poor 
schools, we have excellent schools and public 
libraries. Life in the twentieth century is very 
different from life in the eighteenth ; government 
in the twentieth century must be very different 
from government in the eighteenth. It must be 



ORIGIN AND NATURE OF GOVERNMENT 169 

either more extensive in its function and opera- 
tion, or far less effective in its protection of hu- / 
\ man rights and its enforcement of human duties*v^ 
v* The notion that a complex and extended gov^ 
ernment is inconsistent with freedom grows out 
of the notion that freedom is exemption from 
law ; that liberty and independence are synony- 
mous. But freedom and independence are not 
synonymous, and freedom is not exemption from 
law. Leonard Bacon, in his " Pilgrim Hymn," 
thus describes the cargo the Pilgrims brought 
with them : — 

Laws, freedom, truth, and faith in God 
Came with these exiles o'er the waves. 

Laws ! Freedom ! Can these live in the same ship ? 
Can these flourish in the same community ? What 
do we mean by law ? 

Austin, the famous writer on English law, has 
defined law as the edict of a superior who has 
the power to enforce his will by penalty, a power 
which confers on him his authority, and creates 
in the subject a duty or obligation of obedience. 1 

1 " A command is an order issued by a superior to an inferior. 
It is a signification of desire distinguished by this peculiarity, 
that * the party to whom it is directed is liable to evil from the 
other, in case he comply not with the desire.' * If you are able 
and willing to harm me in case I comply not with your wish, the 
expression of your wish amounts to a command.' Being liable to 



170 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

It is true that power to enforce law is neces- 
sary to law ; but more is necessary ; the possession 
of power does not of itself confer authority 
or create duty. Authority is rightful or just 
power, and something more than the mere pos- 
session of power is necessary to give the possessor 
a right to command or create in the subject a 
duty of obedience. If the law is an unjust law, 
disobedience may become duty. King Darius had 
power to enforce by decree his command, but the 
plain duty of Daniel was to disobey. The Italian 
bandit has power to command his prisoners, but 
he has no just authority over them. If law is 
simply an edict issued by one who has power to 
enforce obedience by penalty, then law and liberty 
are inconsistent. For reluctant submission to a 
superior power which I obey, not because I choose, 
but because I must, is not liberty. The Puritans 
in their revolt against the Stuarts no less than 
the French in their revolt against the Bourbons, 
refused such submission. But the Puritans were 

evil in case I comply not with the wish which you signify, I am 
bound or obliged by it, or I lie under a duty to obey it. The evil is 
called a sanction, and the command or duty is said to be sanctioned 
by the chance of incurring the evil. The three terms, command, 
duty, and sanction are thus inseparably connected. As Austin ex- 
presses it in the language of formal logic, * each of the three terms 
signifies the same notion, but each denotes a different part of that 
notion, and connotes the residue. '" — Encyclopaedia Britannica, 
vol. xiv, p. 356. 



ORIGIN AND NATURE OF GOVERNMENT 171 

not a lawless folk ; they put an unaccustomed 
emphasis on the sacredness of law. 

I venture to offer my own definition of law, 
without, however, claiming for it any originality. 
It is Hebraic in its origin, although it is not form- 
ally stated, so far as I recall, in Hebrew literature. 
But it underlies the conception of law embodied 
in the Old Testament Scriptures. A striking illus- 
tration of it is afforded by the Nineteenth Psalm, 
which many Biblical scholars regard as two dif- 
ferent psalms put together by some editor. 1 I 
hesitate to dissent from them, but in my judg- 
ment the psalm is by one poet who saw what mod- 
ern thinkers have often failed to see, — that law 
is essentially the same in the physical and in the 
spiritual world. " The heavens declare the glory 
of God ; and the firmament sheweth his handi- 
work." That is the operation of law in the phys- 
ical universe. Not less is it true that " the law of 
the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul : the testi- 
mony of the Lord is sure, making wise the sim- 
ple." That is the operation of law in the spiritual 
realm. 

1 Charles Augustus Briggs, LL.D., Critical and Exegetical 
Commentary on the Book of Psalms, vol. i, p. 162 : " Psalm 19 is 
composed of two originally separate poems : (a) a morning 
hymn, praising the glory of 'El in the heavens (v. 2-5b) and 
glorious movements of the sun (v. 5c-7) ; (b) a didactic poem, 
describing the excellence of the Law (v. 8-11), with a petition 
for absolution, restraint from sin, and acceptance in worship 
(v. 12-15)." 



172 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

Law is the nature of the thing of which it is 
predicated. 

By " the law of gravitation " we mean that it 
is the nature of material objects to attract each 
other in a certain definite ratio. By " the laws of 
health " we mean that the nature of the body is 
such that if one takes certain food, drink, air, 
baths, exercise, he will enjoy good health ; if he 
does not, he will have disease. By " the moral 
law " we mean that the social organism is such 
that if we respect each other's right to person, 
property, the family, reputation, the community 
will be prosperous ; if we do not, it will be un- 
prosperous. The scientist does not make the law 
of gravitation ; he finds it. The physician does 
not make the laws of health ; he discovers them. 
Moses did not make the Ten Commandments ; 
he interpreted them. They are not right because 
Jehovah commanded them ; Jehovah commanded 
them because they are right. 

If this be true, if law is the nature of things, the 
nature of man, the nature of society, the nature 
of the universe, the nature of God, there is no 
such thing as freedom from law. To escape from 
law it would be necessary to escape from the 
universe, to escape from God, to escape from 
ourselves. Liberty and lawlessness are not syn- 
onymous. Liberty is not escape from law. 



ORIGIN AND NATURE OF GOVERNMENT 173 

Liberty is voluntary obedience to self- en- 
forced law. 

It is the understanding o£ law, obedience to 
law, the use of law. A man is not free to jump 
off the roof of a house and fly like a bird. If he 
attempts it, he will find himself on the ground 
with a broken leg and not free to walk on the 
earth. He is free to fly when he understands 
the laws of aerial navigation and flies in obedi- 
ence to them. Man is not free to eat and drink 
as much as his gluttonous desires prompt. If he 
attempts to do so, he presently finds that he is 
not free to digest what he has eaten and must 
make up for the one day's feast by several days 
of fasting. Liberty does not mean that the chauf- 
feur may drive his automobile thirty miles an 
hour through the crowded streets of a city, for 
then the pedestrian has not liberty to cross the 
street. Liberty does not mean that the labor 
union may determine the conditions of work for 
non-union men, for then the independent laborer 
is denied liberty to work. Liberty does not mean 
that life-insurance directors may invest their 
funds as they please, for then the bereaved widow 
has no liberty to get her money when her hus- 
band leaves her in poverty. Liberty does not 
mean that a railway may charge what it will and 
give what rebates it chooses, for then the town 



174 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

discriminated against has no liberty to grow, and 
the trader discriminated against has no liberty to 
trade. Only that community is free which recog- 
nizes the sanctity of law — law written in the very 
nature of human society because in the nature of 
the men and women who constitute society — and 
honestly and intelligently endeavors to conform 
its life to that inherent, immutable, eternal law. 
Law is written in the very constitution of the uni- 
verse. Nothing is just law which is not so written. 
The power of a lawgiver does not make law 
just, whether that lawgiver be one or many — an 
aristocracy or a democracy. The consent of the 
governed does not make it just. Conformity to 
the nature of life — material and psychical, in- 
dividual and social — alone makes law just. To 
discard law, put it aside, live as though it were 
not, accept it only so far as it accords with our 
own whims or inclinations is anarchism. To sub- 
mit to it only because there is lodged in the law- 
giver power to inflict a penalty on the disobedient 
is submission to despotism. To recognize its sanc- 
tity, to see its value, to understand its purpose, to 
use it for the common welfare is liberty. For law 
is the nature of the thing concerning which it is 
predicated ; and liberty is voluntary obedience to 
self-recognized and self -enforced law. 

A man's relation to law may be either one of 



ORIGIN AND NATURE OF GOVERNMENT 175 

three relations : he may disregard law ; he may 
submit to law ; he may use law. 

A boy grows up at home, where his health is 
not cared for ; where he eats what he likes, exer- 
cises as he likes, sleeps when he likes ; in short, is 
physically lawless. He is taken seriously ill. The 
doctor finds that he has undermined his constitu- 
tion, and tells him if he does not reform his life 
— eat, sleep, and exercise according to law — he 
has not long to live. The boy reluctantly aban- 
dons his imagined freedom and submits to the 
laws of health. He comes into the second rela- 
tion to the law, the relation of submission. His 
health improves and becomes measurably normal. 
He goes to college and desires to join the crew. 
The trainer says to him, If you wish to join the 
crew, you must accept the conditions of the crew. 
He tells the boy what he must eat and what he 
must not eat ; what he may drink and what he 
must not drink ; when he must go to bed and 
what exercise he must take. The boy, ambitious 
to get on the crew, accepts these directions, loy- 
ally and even gladly. He is now not merely sub- 
mitting to the laws of health, he is using the 
laws of health in order to equip himself for the 
position to which his ambition calls him. Disre- 
gard of law is suicide, obedience to law is health, 
use of law is power. 



176 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

A community which disregards the four funda- 
mental rights of man — the rights of person, of 
property, of the family, and of reputation — lives 
in anarchy and perpetual turmoil ; the end thereof 
is social death. A community of individuals who 
yield obedience to these laws just in so far as 
they must and no further may have a certain 
measure of social health, may at least be pre- 
served from social death. But no community is 
strong, no community is on the highway to a 
great and common prosperity, which does not 
recognize in these laws the conditions of well- 
being, which does not by its united action pro- 
mote the health and life of its members, the 
social purity of its members, the material prosper- 
ity of its members, and the reputation and honor 
of its members. Only such a community is a 
strong, self-governing community ; only such a 
community is truly free. 



CHAPTER XI 

WHO SHOULD GOVERN? 

Government is power to enforce command; 
government is just when the commands en- 
forced are in accord with the great eternal laws of 
right and wrong. The function of government 
in the enforcement of these laws is primarily 
the protection of the four fundamental rights of 
man, — the rights of the person, the rights of the 
family, the rights of property, and the rights of 
reputation. Government may exercise other func- 
tions ; but if it does not exercise this function, 
it is inefficient and incompetent. On whom is 
the duty of protecting the rights of persons and 
property laid ? Upon whom does it devolve in a 
self-governing community? 

Says Abraham Lincoln : " When the white 
man governs himself, that is self-government, but 
when he governs himself and also another man, y y 
that is more than self-government ; that is despofc^'^ 
ism." That is true in its immediate application to 
slavery ; absolutely and unqualifiedly true. For 
one man to'; govern another man, to take charge 
of him, determine what are his interests and con- 



178 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

trol his actions, is despotism. It may be a bene- 
volent despotism ; it may be a just despotism ; 
but whether benevolent and just or malevolent 
and unjust, it is despotism. When a criminal is 
put into State prison, where all his actions are de- 
termined for him by another, he is living under a 
despotism. 

But Abraham Lincoln also said : " The legiti- 
mate object of government is to do for the peo- 
ple what needs to be done, but which they cannot 
by individual effort do at all, or do as well for 
themselves." When the people do collectively 
what needs to be done, but what they cannot by 
individual effort do at all, or do as well for them- 
selves, that is not despotism : that is social self- 
government, although in that social self-govern- 
ment each individual exercises a certain amount 
of control over the actions of every other indi- 
vidual. The community, by its collective action, 
not only establishes a public school, but compels 
the parents to send their child to school ; it not 
only digs a sewer, but it compels the individual 
householder to connect his house with the sewer 
and send the waste, which otherwise would be a 
nuisance to the community, through the sewer ; it 
not only constructs a highway, but it determines 
the rate of speed at which the automobile may be 
driven along the highway. Social self-government 



WHO SHOULD GOVERN? 179 

necessarily involves the government of one indi- 
vidual by other individuals. That is, the compel- 
ling of one individual to do what he does not wish 
to do, or to abstain from what he does wish to do, 
because his will is oppugnant to the will of the 
community. Who have the right to take part in 
this social self-government, in its determining 
what the individual may do or may not do? The 
advocates of universal suffrage claim that every 
member of the community of adult age may take 
part in this social self-government. Starting with 
the assertion, as an axiom, that every man has a 
right to govern himself, they deduce the con- 
clusion that every man has a right to take part in 
the government of others. The conclusion does 
not follow from the premise. On the contrary, I 
believe it may be laid down as a political axiom, 
on which all self-governments should be based, 
that — 

No man has a right to take part in govern- 
ing others who has not the intellectual and 
moral capacity to govern himself. 

The close of the eighteenth century was an 
epoch of revolution. It was characterized by an 
uprising of an oppressed people against their op- 
pressors. In France and in America, following 
the example which had been set in the preceding 
century by the Puritans in England, the common 



180 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

people demanded their rights. The question of 
political philosophy was, what are the rights of 
the common people ? The claim of despotism was 
that the common people had no political rights ; 
they were children who were to submit without 
question to the authority of their parents. Louis 
XVIII, returning from his exile in England to 
Paris, thus defined, with curious naivete, the 
Bourbon conception of the relation between king 
and people : a If my right to the throne were not 
altogether founded on that law [the divine right 
of kings, recognized by the ancient law of France], 
what claim should I have to it ? What am I apart 
from that right ? An infirm old man, a miserable 
outlaw, reduced to begging, far from his coun- 
try, for shelter and food. That is what I was 
only a few days ago ; but that old man, that out- 
law, was the King of France. That title alone 
sufficed to make the whole nation, when at last 
it understood its real interests, recall me to the 
throne of my fathers. I have come back in an- 
swer to the call, but I have come back King of 
France." ! 

In such an epoch the emphasis, alike of leaders 
and of people, was laid upon rights. This view 
we have inherited from our fathers. We have 
formed the habit of looking at all the political 

1 Gilbert Stenger, The Return of Louis XVIII, p. 177. 



WHO SHOULD GOVERN? 181 

duties as rights and privileges, as something to 
which we have a claim, something which will 
confer a benefit upon us. All men, we think, 
have an equal right to hold office, and when one 
man has held office four years, his neighbor says, 
it is now my turn. The ballot we think of as 
something by which we are to protect our own 
interests and promote our own welfare. We se- 
lect a Representative, who must come from our 
political district, and who, in the House of Re- 
presentatives, will seek such legislation as will 
promote our local welfare ; we select Senators 
who will represent our State and promote the in- 
terests of our State in the National legislation. 

The next step is easy and natural. Special in- 
terests send representatives to Congress. Appro- 
priations for public buildings, or for river and 
harbor improvements, and special advantage for 
special industries in the protective tariff are en- 
gineered by skillful politicians, each seeking, 
with perhaps personal disinterestedness, to pro- 
mote the pecuniary advantage of his own clien- 
tele. Under the corrupting influence of this false 
conception the professional politician becomes 
scarcely less an advocate of a special interest in 
Congress than is the paid counsel before the 
courts. 

But the evil effect of this point of view does 



182 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

not stop with the professional politician. The 
individual voter votes for his own interests : one 
man to secure a higher protection for his manu- 
factured goods, another to get a contract from 
the government, a third to get a job from the con- 
tractor, and a fourth to get a five-dollar-bill from 
the political committee. The story is told — I 
believe it is authentic — that a Western cowboy 
arrested for murder wrote to Mr. Roosevelt for 
financial aid in securing competent defense, but 
subsequently returned the contribution, saying: 
" I do not need it ; we have elected the district 
attorney ! " 

It is high time we changed our point of view ; 
high time that we realized that suffrage is not 
a natural right — is not a right at all. It is a 
sacred duty ; a right only as every man has a 
right to do his duty. " Public office is a public 
trust." How that sentence rang through the 
land ! It was better than a speech. Suffrage is a 
public office, and therefore a public trust, and no 
man is entitled to have that public trust commit- 
ted to him unless he is at least able to govern 
himself. The Southern States have in this re- 
spect set an example which it would be well if it 
were possible for all the States to follow. Many 
of them have adopted in their Constitution a 
qualified suffrage. The qualifications are not the 



WHO SHOULD GOVERN? 183 

same in all the States, but there is not one of 
those States in which every man, black or white, 
has not a legal right to vote provided he can 
read and write the English language, owns three 
hundred dollars' worth of property, and has paid 
his taxes. A provision that no man should vote 
unless he has intelligence enough to read and 
write, thrift enough to have laid up three hun- 
dred dollars' worth of property, and patriotism 
enough to have paid his taxes would not be a 
bad provision for any State in the Union to in- 
corporate in its Constitution. 

We talk about giving to the negroes, to the 
Filipinos, and to the Porto Ricans self-govern- 
ment. What President Wilson, of Princeton Uni- 
versity, has said on this subject would be well 
worth printing on a card and sending to every 
voter : — 

We cannot give them self-government. Self-gov- 
ernment is not a thing that can be " given " to any 
people, because it is a form of character and not a form 
of constitution. No people can be " given" the self-con- 
trol of maturity. Only a long apprenticeship of obedi- 
ence can secure them the precious possession, a thing 
no more to be bought than given. They cannot be pre- 
sented with the character of a community, but it may 
confidently be hoped that they will become a community 
under the wholesome and salutary influences of just 
laws and a sympathetic administration ; that they will 



184 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

after'a while understand and master themselves, if in the 
meantime they are understood and served in good con- 
science by those set over them in authority. 1 

Hitherto the duty of protecting the funda- 
mental rights of persons and property in civilized 
communities has devolved upon the men. There 
is a small but very earnest minority of women 
who insist that women should share in this duty 
of protection. Are they right? Does this obliga- 
tion rest upon them, or are they exempt from it ? 
To answer that question let us consider briefly 
the problem of life. What are we on this earth 
for? Is there any interpretation of its enigma, 
any rational meaning to existence ? 

We are born ; grow up in families, under the 
protection and guidance of father and mother. 
We are nursed, taught, trained for life's work. 
We grow to maturity; marry ; children are given 
to us ; we provide for them until they are old 
enough to provide for themselves ; govern them 
until they are old enough to govern themselves; 
then they marry and children are given to 
them. We tarry a few years as grandparents, 
to enjoy the privilege of the children without 
the responsibility, and then pass off the stage. 
And so the process goes on generation after gen- 

1 Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United 
States, p. 53. 



WHO SHOULD GOVERN? 185 

eration ; every generation growing a little in 
knowledge, wisdom, and virtue; but each mem- 
ber of every generation, if the parents are cap- 
able and efficient, growing from ignorance to 
knowledge, from folly to wisdom, from incapacity 
to ability, from innocence through struggle to 
virtue. What does it all mean? 

What can it mean but this ? that we are in one 
stage of an existence the future stages of which 
no one can foresee any more than the acorn can 
foresee the oak or the seed the flower, or the cater- 
pillar the butterfly. What can it mean but this? 
that life is itself a preparation for life, a long 
schooling, and death a graduation. 

And in this process woman is the creator of 
life. She is physiologically its creator. She is in 
the order of nature the custodian of the infant 
in all the earlier stages of its existence. She is 
the one who feeds and nurses and leads and trains 
and educates it. And while she is thus absorbed 
in the highest and divinest ministry, in serving the 
very end of life itself, the man is the bread-winner 
and protector. He goes out to wrest from nature 
food for the supply of the family. If enemies at- 
tack it from without, he arises to defend it from 
assault. If criminals by violence or by fraud en- 
deavor to rob it of its sustenance, he is its natural 
guardian from the wrongdoer. His influence is 



186 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

not unneeded in the training of the children, but 
it is incidental and secondary ; it must be inci- 
dental and secondary, because, if mother and 
child are to be fed, sheltered, and protected, he 
must be, during most of the hours of the day, 
away from home. There is a pathetic story in the 
Old Testament, a transcript from life, which il- 
lustrates this parental relationship. A boy is with 
his father and the reapers in the field. The hot 
sun overpowers him. He cries out, " My head, my 
head ! " The father says to a servant, " Take him to 
his mother/' and goes on with his work. And the 
child lies on his mother's lap until noon, and then 
dies. It is the instinctive message of father and 
mother the world over, and will be while the world 
stands. From the father, " Carry the child to his 
mother." From the mother, " Give me the child." 
By a law of nature written in the constitution of 
the family, written in her constitution and in his, 
written in their physical nature and in their mental 
and moral nature, she is the creator of life and the 
minister to life, and he is the bread-winner and 
protector while she fulfills her sacred task. 

If she is wife and mother, this high, sacred, 
supreme creative duty demands and has all her 
thought, all her life. If she is not, still she finds 
in supplemental service opportunities for this min- 
istry to life. She teaches in the school, she nurses 



WHO SHOULD GOVERN? 187 

in the hospitals, she ministers in the charities of the 
community and of the church, she cooperates as 
domestic, as sister, as aunt, with the overworked 
and overburdened mother in carrying on the life 
of the household. Hers is the vital, the essential 
service. His is necessary that she may do hers. 
They cannot possibly exchange. In the nature of 
the case he never can do hers. Shall she take his in 
addition to her own, and become not only the life- 
giver, but also the bread-winner and the protector; 
not only the mother, the nurse, the teacher, but 
also the magistrate, the policeman, the tiller of 
the soil, the sailor of the ship, the worker of the 
town ? Can she do both and do them well ? 

I do not wish to speak in derogation of the ad- 
vocates of woman suffrage. Among them are some 
noble, womanly women, driven or drawn into the 
movement by the faith that the suffrage in 
woman's hands would be an instrument of incal- 
culable value in the work of life ministry. But not 
many of the mothers devoting their lives to hus- 
band and children at home, not many of the teach- 
ers absorbed in the fascinating task of making 
men and women out of boys and girls, not many 
of the women active in the philanthropic work 
of our Christian churches or in our public chari- 
ties, are among those whose names are bruited 
in the newspapers as advocates of this revolu- 



188 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

tion. How can they be? They have too much 
of more important work to do. How can the agi- 
tators be simultaneously caring for their own 
children or the uncared-for children of others ? 
They are absorbed in the one task of getting the 
ballot as the one important and essential achieve- 
ment for the redemption of society. 

I am an advocate of woman's rights — her right 
to be exempt from the duty of protecting persons 
and property ; to be exempt from sharing in the 
burdens and responsibilities of government ; her 
right to give herself wholly and unreservedly to 
the task which God has given her of being 1 the 
creator and developer of human life, the maker 
of character. It would be the grossest injustice 
for us men, who have hitherto had this duty to 
perform, to shirk our duty and impose it upon 
women, except upon the most conclusive demon- 
stration that she desires to assume it. At present 
all the evidence points us to the conclusion that she ' 
has no such desire. This is indeed an uncontested 
point, admitted by the more intelligent and fair- 
minded of the advocates of the great revolution. 
And I urge all women whom my voice can reach 
or my words can influence not to follow the blind 
leaders of the blind, not to be cheated by a false 
political philosophy and a false social sentim ent, n ot 
to turn aside from their great vocation, the ministry 



WHO SHOULD GOVERN? 189 

to life, which no one can take up if they lay it down, 
in order that they may take up the lower and lesser 
vocation. To protect life and property is not so 
great a service as to use property in ministering 
to life. To promote by political action the gen- 
eral welfare is not so great a service as to create 
and develop the individual for whose creation and 
development governments exist, and whose per- 
sonal character is the supremest factor in the 
general well-being. 

How shall a self-governing community ascer- 
tain the judgment and the will of the members of 
the community? In a pure democracy the people 
pass on every proposition, as in the old-time New 
England town meeting or in the present demo- 
cratic government in Switzerland. In representa- 
tive government the people elect representatives 
into whose hands they intrust the work of the 
government. They select the men, but the work 
of carrying on the government is intrusted to the 
men whom they select. There is a movement in 
our day in America toward more pure democracy, 
toward less representative government. Theoreti- 
cally we elect our Presidents by an electoral col- 
lege ; that is, by representative government. In 
fact, we elect them by a popular vote. Theoreti- 
cally, the election of our Senators is left to the 
representative bodies in the various States, but in 



190 THE SPIRIT OP DEMOCRACY 

an increasing number of those States the election 
is generally effected by the people directly. 

On the other hand, our tendency in other than 
political circles is toward representative govern- 
ment rather than pure democracy. In our great 
corporations the stockholders do not vote on such 
questions as what stock they will issue, what 
branch roads they will build, what rates they will 
charge. The stockholders elect certain trusted 
men, and leave the decision of these questions in 
their hands. As in the great commercial enter- 
prises, so in the great philanthropic and religious 
organizations. The churches do not pass in detail 
upon the questions that come before the church. 
They elect a board, and the board elects an execu- 
tive committee and secretaries, and the adminis- 
tration in detail is left in the hands of these ex- 
ecutive committees and of the secretaries. I need 
not undertake to discuss in this connection the 
relative advantages of pure democracy and repre- 
sentative government. It is enough to point out 
to my readers that if representative government 
is really representative, if the persons elected do 
really represent the judgment and the will of the 
electors, a representative government is as truly 
democratic as a pure democracy. 

Representative government has been injured 
in our country by the false notion that if we elect 



WHO SHOULD GOVERN? 191 

a great many officials we are more democratic 
than if we elect a few, whereas, in fact, we are 
more democratic if we elect a few than if we elect 
many. In New York State we elect a Governor 
and five heads of departments: a Secretary of 
State, a Comptroller, an Attorney-General, a State 
Engineer, a Treasurer, How many New York 
readers of this book could tell the names of these 
officials for whom many of those readers voted 
in the last election? Nay, more than that — how 
many think themselves competent to elect an 
Attorney-General or a State Engineer ? I confess 
frankly that I am not. I can form some judg- 
ment as to the man who I am willing should act 
for me in choosing an Attorney-General familiar 
with the law, or a State Engineer competent to 
supervise the engineering work of the State, but 
I have neither the personal knowledge nor the 
professional knowledge which fits me to make 
the selection myself. 

In the Federal Government we pursue a wiser, 
and really a more democratic course. We elect a 
President and a Vice-President, and the President 
appoints his heads of departments. He can, there- 
fore, rightly be held responsible for all that is 
done, or left undone, in the various departments. 
Under the present method in our Federal elec- 
tions we select one man and hold him responsible 



192 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

for results ; in many of our States, in New York 
State, for example, we cast our vote between two 
sets of candidates selected for us by leaders whom 
we often do not know and whom we cannot hold 
responsible if the selection does not prove satis- 
factory. 

Government is by parties, and in a self-gov- 
erning community the parties ought to be self- 
governing. To-day they are not self-governing 
in fact, whatever they may be in theory. The 
forms and methods differ in different communities, 
but the following description may serve by way 
of illustration : ' The members of the party in a 
given district meet in some appointed place in 
what is known as a primary. In fact, the meeting 
is composed almost exclusively of place-hunters 
and their friends. To this meeting a list of dele- 
gates to a nominating convention, or a series of 
nominating conventions, is presented by a com- 
mittee which is practically self-constituted, al- 
though it has been formally elected by a previous 
primary. The character of these primaries as 
conducted in the " good old times " — that is, a 

1 I follow James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, chaps. 
lix, lx, lxi, and lxii. Some materia) improvements have been 
made and in some of the States radical and revolutionary 
changes since this work was written (1888), but it still remains 
an excellent description of the primary method of nomination as 
devised and operated by the professional politician. 



WHO SHOULD GOVERN? 193 

quarter of a century ago — is indicated by the 
fact, reported by Mr. Bryce, that, of the 1007 
primaries and conventions of all parties held in 
New York city preparatory to the election of 1884, 
633 took place in liquor saloons. 

There has been some improvement since then, 
and in many of the States the primaries are now 
recognized and regulated by law. But the per- 
sonnel remains largely what it was formerly. If 
independent voters attend, they are generally 
outvoted, or, if that by any chance proves impos- 
sible, they are outmaneuvered, and the prepared 
list of delegates put forward by the Committee 
is elected either without opposition or despite an 
opposition which is futile. These delegates attend 
the nominating conventions — town, county, 
and State — and nominate the candidates previ- 
ously designated by the committee, and usually 
previously designated to the . committee by the 
boss. So well is this understood that newspaper 
men, when the convention meets, rarely inter- 
view the delegates, except such as are known to 
be near the boss and likely to be acquainted with 
his orders. Occasionally public sentiment in a 
State runs so strongly for a particular man that 
the boss yields, or the convention overrules the 
boss. But this rarely happens, and it never 
happens except in the case of some important 



194 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

office, like that of Governor or United States 
Senator. When the election takes place, the two 
sets of candidates nominated in this fashion, 
nominally by a convention, really by a small 
and irresponsible committee, or a still smaller 
and more irresponsible boss, are put before 
the voter, and his sole function in politics is 
to select between the two. How far this method 
of nominating a host of candidates for all the 
offices, and nominating them by an irresponsible 
oligarchy, is from self-government the following 
paragraph from Mr. Bryce's " American Com- 
monwealth " makes very clear : — 

The elective offices are so numerous that ordinary 
citizens cannot watch them, and cease to care who gets 
them. The conventions come so often that busy men 
cannot serve in them. The minor offices are so unat- 
tractive that able men do not stand for them. The 
primary lists are so contrived that only a fraction of 
the party get on them; and of this fraction many are 
too lazy or too busy or too careless to attend. The 
mass of the voters are ignorant; knowing nothing 
about the personal merits of the candidates, they are 
ready to follow their leaders like sheep. Even the 
better class, however they may grumble, are swayed 
by the inveterate habit of party loyalty and prefer a 
bad candidate of their own to a (probably not better) 
candidate of the other party. It is less trouble to put 
up with impure officials, costly city government, a job- 



WHO SHOULD GOVERN? 195 

bing State legislature, an inferior sort of congressman, 
than to sacrifice one's own business in the effort to 
set things right. Thus the Machine works on, and 
grinds out places, power, and the opportunities for il- 
licit gain for those who manage it. 

The remedy for this condition is very plain : it 
is such a reconstruction of party machinery that 
the voters will be enabled not merely to choose 
between candidates placed before them, but also 
to determine who those candidates shall be. Vari- 
ous plans have been proposed, and some plans are 
now on trial, having for their desired object the 
accomplishment of this result. It does not come 
within the scope of this book to discuss the mer- 
its of these different plans. Such comparative 
study as I have been able to give to them leads 
me to regard as the best method yet devised the 
one urged by Governor Hughes on the Legisla- 
ture of New York State. That plan would ap- 
pear, more successfully than any other of those 
proposed, to secure party organization and effi- 
ciency and at the same time to put them under 
democratic control. Two things are, however, to 
me very clear : on the one hand, that any efficient 
plan of transferring political power from the oli- 
garchy to the people will be fought by resource- 
ful and unscrupulous politicians ; and, on the 
other hand, that the increasing insistence of an 



196 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

awakened people on their rights and duties will 
eventually perfect the machinery of a self-gov- 
erning Republic by making the parties self-gov- 
erning. 

Our free institutions are threatened by two 
foes : plutocracy and mobocracy, lawless wealth 
and lawless passion. These are the two serpents 
that have always come up out of the sea to 
strangle liberty. They destroyed Greece; they 
destroyed Rome ; will they destroy America ? 
America as a self-governing community is as yet 
only in its experimental stage. We can hand it 
down to our posterity purified and strengthened, 
only by being true to the oath which Abraham 
Lincoln, in one of his early public addresses, pro- 
posed to the young men of Springfield, Illinois : 
" Let every American, every lover of liberty, 
every well-wisher to his posterity, swear by the 
blood of the Revolution never to violate in the 
least particular the laws of the country, and 
never to tolerate their violation by others." ' We 
must recognize the divine nature of law and its 
sacred sanctions ; we must make the Republic 
not only a community of self-governing indivi- 
duals but a self-governing community ; we must 

1 Address before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, 
Illinois, January 27, 1837. Complete Works, p. 12. 



WHO SHOULD GOVERN? 197 

cure the evils of present democracy by a truer 
and more consistent democracy ; we must recon- 
cile liberty and law by making law the instru- 
ment of liberty ; and we must carry both liberty 
and law not only into our government but into 
all our institutions. We who have emancipated 
the laborer from chains must emancipate him 
from dependence on the capitalists; we must be- 
gin by making capitalists and laborers partners 
in a common enterprise, and end by making the 
capitalists also laborers and the laborers also cap- 
italists. We must bring the home, the school, and 
the church into a closer and more cordial coop- 
eration in the work of education, and so extend 
that education, both in the character of the sub- 
jects treated and in the classes of population 
taught, that it will provide a fair equipment of 
all the people, in all the arts of life, for all hon- 
orable vocations, and so fit them by self-educa- 
tion to be both self-supporting and self-govern- 
ing. And we must recognize the home as the 
fundamental social organization, underlying all 
other organizations, and marriage as no mere 
commercial or social partnership founded on 
contract, but a divine order founded on the nat- 
ural comradeship between man and woman, who 
are essentially different and essentially equal. 



CHAPTER Xn 

THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY IN RELIGION 

True religion is the same in all ages : " The life 
of God in the soul of man." It is doing justly, 
loving mercy, and walking humbly with God ; it 
is faith and hope and love ; it is realizing the 
invisible world, aspiring toward a divine future, 
seeking the well-being of others. 

But because it is life it changes from age to 
age. " When I was a child/' says Paul, u I spake 
as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as 
a child ; but when I became a man, I put away 
childish things. " The man not only speaks a 
different language from the child, he apprehends 
life differently, he thinks different thoughts, and 
has different experiences. The faith of a man is 
not a child's faith ; his hopes are different, his 
loves are different. The religion of the twentieth 
century and of the first century are the same — 
that is, they are both the life of God in the soul 
of man. Yet they are different, as the life of na- 
ture is different in October from the life of nature 
in May. Religion is a working life, therefore it 
has an organization — a church ; it is an intel- 



SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY IN RELIGION 199 

lectual life, therefore it has ordered thought — 
a theology ; it is an emotional life, therefore 
it has an experience and a worship. And this 
church, this theology, this experience and wor- 
ship, change in the race as in the individual. 
The religious life is not the same in a democratic 
as in an autocratic society. 

Christianity, passing out from Judea into Rome, 
passed from a partially democratic into a wholly 
autocratic world. It transformed the world, but 
was itself transformed. The Church of Rome is 
not a copy of the Jewish synagogue ; the theology 
of Augustine is not a copy of the Sermon on the 
Mount; the worship of the mass is not patterned 
after the primitive prayer-meetings described in 
the Books of Acts. The Church of Rome was an 
imperial church with a supreme pontiff whose 
power was autocratic, whose word was final. The 
theology of Latin Christians was an imperial the- 
ology : God was King ; law was his edict ; the 
Bible was a book of laws ; its canons of inter- 
pretation were legal canons ; sin was rebellion ; 
forgiveness was remission of penalty ; atonement 
was transfer of penalty from the guilty to the 
innocent. Man is not a bundle of separated fac- 
ulties. His experience determines his thinking ; 
his thinking colors his experiences. In this im- 
perial religion worship was a petition for pardon 



200 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

by rebellious but penitent subjects, addressing a 
justly indignant sovereign whose gracious par- 
don was besought by intercessors and purchased 
by the offering of a perpetual but bloodless sac- 
rifice. 

Changes in organization are more easily effected 
than changes in habits of thought or in types 
of experience. The religious revolution which 
for the Protestant world overthrew autocracy in 
church government has more gradually intro- 
duced the democratic spirit into the thought of 
the Church, and still more gradually into the ex- 
perience of Christians. But we are coming to a 
consciousness of the change which that spirit is 
effecting. In the Roman Catholic Church we call 
it Modernism ; in the Protestant Church we call 
it sometimes the New Theology, sometimes the 
Spirit of Humanitarianism. It is criticised as an 
innovation and condemned as a heresy ; but I 
believe that it is a new phase in the victory of 
Hebraism over paganism, of a democratic Chris- 
tianity over a pagan autocracy. The democratic, 
that is the Christian, spirit is transfusing our 
thoughts and our experiences as well as our po- 
litical and religious organizations ; and we are 
trying, half consciously, to readjust to the new 
conditions our intellectual and spiritual expres- 
sions. The democratic spirit does not deny the 



SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY IN RELIGION 201 

affirmations of the autocratic religion; it reaf- 
firms them, but it gives to them a new signifi- 
cance. It conceives that God is a Sovereign ; 
that laws emanate from him ; that the Bible is a 
trustworthy interpretation of those laws; that 
sin is lawlessness ; that forgiveness involves 
some remission of penalty; and that it is ac- 
complished through the offering of sacrifice. 
But filled with the democratic, that is the Chris- 
tian, spirit, the legalistic theology ceases to be 
legalistic and becomes spiritual, ceases to be su- 
pernatural and is becoming more frankly human 
because more truly divine. 

There is no better definition of Political De- 
mocracy than Abraham Lincoln's u Government 
of the people, by the people, for the people.'' It 
is the doctrine of Political Democracy that the 
source of authority is in the people and that 
authority is to be exercised by the people and for 
their benefit. It is the doctrine of Industrial De- 
mocracy that the source of wealth is in the people 
and wealth is to be used by the people and for 
their benefit. The doctrine of Religious Demo- 
cracy may be similarly expressed : Religion is of 
the people, by the people, for the people. The 
source of the religious life is in human nature ; 
its instruments and institutions exist for men 
and are to be controlled by men. Religion is the 



202 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

natural life of man, — his privilege and preroga- 
tive, his inheritance and equipment. It is the 
democratic spirit in religion which is making 
those changes in religious thought and life which 
are the despair of some, a sacrilege to many, 
but a joy and inspiration to an increasing num- 
ber. 

The democratic spirit regards, or is slowly com- 
ing to regard, the religious life as the natural life of 
man, and irreligion as unnatural. It regards reli- 
gion as a life developed in man, not as something 
external imposed upon him. It esteems that life 
as supernatural in no other sense than as art lif e, 
or musical life, or literary life, or business life is 
supernatural — supernatural because in God we 
live and move and have our being. Jesus com- 
pares the Kingdom of God to a seed which 
groweth up secretly ; for the earth, he says, 
bring eth forth of herself. The democratic spirit 
accepts this figure as an interpretation of the 
Kingdom of God in the individual soul : the soul 
bringeth forth of itself. God, says the Hebrew 
Psalm of Creation, made man in his own image 
and breathed into him the breath of life. The 
democratic spirit believes this to be true of all 
men — Jew and Gentile, Christian and pagan, 
saint and sinner. We are his offspring, says Paul, 
and in saying that he quotes a heathen poet. The 



SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY IN RELIGION 203 

democratic spirit believes that the publicans and 
sinners are the offspring of God. It believes not 
less in the divineness of religion, but more ; as 
the gardener who believes that plants without 
the hothouse live not less by the warmth of the 
sun than those within. 

The democratic spirit identifies the laws of na- 
ture with the laws of God. The moral law, like 
natural law, is not imposed from without ; it is 
constituted within. It was not given to man, it 
was created in man, or, if the reader prefer, it was 
given to him in and by his creation. Thou shalt 
not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou 
shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness, 
were all written in the conscience of man before 
they were written on tables of stone. They would 
be just as obligatory if they had not been written 
on tables of stone. They are just as obligatory on 
those who have never heard of the tables of stone. 
When Jesus Christ says, Thou shalt love the Lord 
thy God with all thy heart and soul and mind 
and strength, what he says to us is : That is what 
you were made for ; love is your natural aptitude ; 
you were fitted for love as the fish for the sea and 
the bird for the air. 

The democratic spirit finds the authority and 
source of religion, not in priests or prophets, past 
or present — that is, neither in the Book nor in 



204 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

the Church — but in the soul's own recognition 
of its divinely ordered duties and divinely be- 
stowed privileges. The Church is an authority in 
so far as it gives true expression to the spiritual 
consciousness of spiritual souls. The Bible is an 
authority in so far as it is an expression of spir- 
itual experience by men of a truly spiritual na- 
ture, whose experiences have power to awaken an 
indorsing echo in our own souls. 

It is this power in the Bible to awaken a re- 
sponse in our own souls that makes it a revelation. 
Kevealing is unveiling ; discovery is uncovering. 
The two processes are identical ; the two words 
are synonymous. That theology uses one and 
science the other is not material. The scientist 
sees bacteria in the blood ; they were always there, 
but he uncovers them. He says, If you will look 
through the microscope, you can see them for 
yourself. And we do. The prophet sees God in 
nature and in his own soul. God was always there ; 
the prophet unveils him. Then he says, If you will 
look for yourself, you also can see him. And we 
do. Professor Huxley watches the development 
of a plant or an animal from its embryo; wrought 
" in so artistic a way that, after watching the 
process hour by hour, one is almost involuntarily 
possessed by the notion that some more subtle aid 
to vision than an achromatic would show the hid- 



SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY IN RELIGION 205 

den artist — with his plan before him — striving 
with skillful manipulation to perfect his work." * 
This is revelation — unveiling. Matthew Arnold 
watches the development of spiritual life in the 
history of human society and in the biography 
of the individual soul, and gives to the skeptic 
this counsel : " But if, on the other hand, they 
ask, 'How are we to verify that there rules an 
enduring Power not ourselves, which makes 
for righteousness ? ' — we may answer at once : 
' How ? Why, as you verify that fire burns — by 
experience ! It is so ; try it! you can try it; every 
case of conduct, of that which is more than three- 
fourths of your own life and of the life of all 
mankind, will prove it to you/ " 2 

God is revealed to us when he is unveiled to 
us, the Master Workman in nature, the guiding 
Personality in history, the Life of the individual 
soul. The experience of God in others when it 
awakens a similar experience in us is a revela- 
tion ; if it awakens no such experience in us, it is 
no revelation. Thus the Twenty-third Psalm is a 
revelation to some readers and not a revelation 
to others. The democratic spirit looks upon the 
Bible as a volume of illuminating and inspiring 
human experiences ; it believes that there is no ex- 

1 Lay Sermons, p. 260. 

2 Literature and Dogma, p. 267. 



206 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

perience in the Book that has not its counterpart 
in modern spiritual experiences. It values the 
Book not as a substitute for such experiences but 
as a means of awakening them in the spirit of 
the reader. When the minister attempts to make 
the Bible speak to this democratic age with the 
kind of authority with which it spoke to a former 
autocratic age, he simply closes the minds of his 
hearers against its message. 

In the Protestant churches, which are the chil- 
dren of the democratic movement, the autocratic 
authority of the Church is vehemently denied. 
Even in the Catholic Church (whether Roman 
or Anglican), the spirit of Modernism is endea- 
voring to reconcile loyalty to the Church as 
the ultimate authority with the democratic spirit. 
It does not succeed and cannot. The question 
between Protestantism and Catholicism is not a 
mere question of theological creed or ecclesiasti- 
cal order. It is vital and fundamental : the ques- 
tion whether the source and authority of reli- 
gion resides in a divinely constituted organization, 
from which we are to receive our instructions 
and our commands, as children from their father, 
or whether the source and authority of religion 
is in the people, and the voice of the Church or 
the churches, whether ancient or modern, is the 
voice of a common spiritual consciousness, in 



SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY IN RELIGION 207 

which we find authority as we find it in the con- 
current testimony of many witnesses to any facts 
of life, whether it he physical or spiritual ; the 
question whether God's inspiring and counseling 
presence is universal and brings with it a gift of 
eternal life which is as free to all as the air we 
breathe and the sunshine which vitalizes and em- 
powers us, or whether eternal life, bestowed by 
an absentee God, is piped and conduited through 
an appointed hierarchy, from whom alone the 
laity can receive it. It must be added that if 
Modernists find it difficult to maintain a doctrine 
and practice of liberty in an autocratic church, 
Protestant doctors of divinity find it not less 
difficult to maintain a doctrine of ecclesiastical 
authority in churches increasingly pervaded by 
the democratic spirit. 

Because thus the democratic spirit finds the au- 
thority of both Book and Church in the response 
which the awakened spiritual life of the individ- 
ual makes, it takes but a languid interest in the 
subject of miracles. If the authority of religion 
is external, if it is in messengers of an olden time 
speaking for God, we have a right to demand 
some authentication of their right to speak. But 
if the authority is in the Voice within our own 
souls, whether the marvelous events recorded in 
the Bible took place as recorded or whether some 



208 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

did and some did not take place, becomes a his- 
torical, not a religious question. To one who 
believes that God is always in nature and in man, 
it is neither incredible that there should have 
been at times clearer and more striking, or at 
least more visible and material evidences of his 
presence than there are now, nor, on the other 
hand, that evidences such as are now passed by 
without being interpreted or even scarcely ob- 
served, save as curious phenomena, had in former 
times their inner and spiritual significance better 
interpreted. But it is also true that, since our 
faith does not depend upon those interpretations, 
doubts concerning them do little to disturb our 
faith. One who believes in the universal pre- 
sence of God finds it both less difficult and less 
important to believe in certain unusual indica- 
tions of that presence in ancient times as he finds 
them reported in the Bible. 

How does the democratic spirit regard Jesus 
Christ ? 

The democratic spirit is no longer interested 
in the old debates about the Person of Christ 
and is not satisfied with the old definitions. The 
various theological questions which are different 
forms of the one question, What is the meta- 
physical relation of Jesus Christ to the Infinite ? 
does not interest; the old definition of Christ as 



SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY IN RELIGION 209 

"the only-begotten Son of God, Begotten of 
his Father before all worlds ; God of God, Light 
of Light, very God of very God ; Begotten not 
made ; Being of one substance with the Father," 
does not satisfy. When, on special days, the Ni- 
cene Creed is repeated, its phraseology is regarded, 
I venture to say, by most worshipers as the lan- 
guage of reverence, not of exact definition. The 
Trinitarian churches have hundreds of members 
who could not tell whether they are Trinitarians 
or Unitarians, and thousands of members who 
could not tell why they are Trinitarians. 

And yet it is certain that the tendency in 
democracy is toward an increasing, not a lessen- 
ing, reverence for Jesus of Nazareth. The multi- 
plicity of lives of Christ written by representa- 
tives of every school of thought, the regard with 
which, with hardly an exception, his name and 
character are treated by these various authors, 
the direct testimony to his character and influ- 
ence by orthodox and liberal, Catholic and Pro- 
testant, Jew, Gentile, and Christian, indicate a re- 
markable and growing unity of reverence for his 
life and character. Among the books in my library 
is a recent commentary on the Gospel of John 
written by a Brahmin for Brahminical readers, 
and one on the Synoptic Gospels written by a 
Jew for Jewish readers j in both Jesus is treated 



210 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

as an eminent if not a supreme teacher of the reli- 
gion of the Spirit. The closing sentences of Re- 
nan's " Life of Jesus " are a classic: "Whatever 
unlooked-for events the future may have in store, 
Jesus will never be surpassed. His worship will 
increasingly renew its youth ; his story will call 
forth endless tears ; his suffering will subdue the 
noblest heart ; all ages will proclaim that among 
the sons of men no one has been born who is 
greater than he." 

Whether democratic Christianity will attempt 
a new definition of Jesus Christ may be doubted. 
Perhaps it will be content simply to listen to him 
and follow him without defining him. As yet it 
has furnished no better definition than that sug- 
gested by Henry van Dyke in the phrase u the 
human life of God." In this sentence is indicated 
the direction in which we are to look for the re- 
conciliation between the belief of the democratic 
spirit that the source and authority of religion 
is in the people and the reverence of the demo- 
cratic spirit for Jesus Christ as the supreme 
expression of the religious life. 

While the faith of the future in Jesus Christ 
cannot now be formulated, certain things may be 
said respecting it, with a considerable degree of 
certainty. 

Jesus Christ is not the founder of religion. 



SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY IN RELIGION 211 

Keligion existed before he was born, and exists 
to-day among many peoples who have scarcely 
even heard of his name. He is not the founder 
of a special religion. For a special religion must 
have its creed, its ritual, and its ecclesiastical 
organization ; and Jesus] Christ formulated no 
creed, prescribed no ritual, and framed no eccle- 
siastical organization. 1 

Jesus Christ defined his own mission in the 
memorable words, " I am come that they might 
have life, and that they might have it more abun- 
dantly." He was and is a life-giver. This life is 
religion : the religion of faith and hope and love ; 
the religion of doing justly, loving mercy, and 
walking humbly with God. Of this life his own 
is a supreme example — an example possible for 
us to follow. It is characteristically a human life. 
To do justly means to the Christian to act in hu- 
man dealings in the spirit in which Jesus Christ 
acted ; to love mercy means to the Christian to 
have compassion on the suffering and the sinful 
as Jesus Christ had compassion ; to walk humbly 
with God means to the Christian to live in the 

1 Even Catholic scholars, who hold that Jesus Christ ap- 
pointed his Apostles and their successors to be the authoritative 
heads of the Church, will hardly affirm that he did more than 
authorize them to frame the organization of the future ecclesi- 
astical body ; and no one affirms that Jesus Christ formulated a 
creed or prescribed a ritual. 



212 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

same filial relation with the Father in which Jesus 
Christ habitually lived. To all who profess and 
call themselves Christians the Christian religion 
can mean nothing less than this. And this is 
both a divine life and a human life ; a divine life 
because it is a human life, and a human life be- 
cause it is a divine life. For there is no differ- 
ence. And he who manifests the ideal human 
life does, by so manifesting the ideal human life, 
reveal, that is, unveil, the divine life — "the 
human life of God." 

To say that the source and authority of Chris- 
tianity are in Jesus Christ is to say that they are 
in human nature, for Jesus Christ is the repre- 
sentative type in history of what human nature 
is in the conception of Him who has made man 
in His own image. If any of my readers are in- 
clined to start back at this statement, let them 
ask themselves what John means when he says 
that as he was so are we to be in this world ; 
what Paul means when he says that God has pre- 
destined us to be conformed to the image of his 
Son that he might be the first-born among many 
brethren; what Jesus himself means when he prays 
that we may be one in him and the Father, as he 
was one in the Father, that the glory which the 
Father had given him he gave to us, and that as 
he was sent into the world he in like manner sends 



SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY IN RELIGION 213 

us into the world ; or what the New Testament 
means by applying to Christians in a modified 
form almost, if not quite, all the titles it ap- 
plies to Christ. He is the Well-Beloved Son of 
God, and we are sons of God ; he is the Light of 
the World, and we are lights of the world; he is 
the Great High Priest, and we are priests unto 
God ; he is the great Sacrifice, and we are told to 
offer ourselves a living sacrifice ; he forgives our 
sins, and whosesoever sins we remit are remitted 
unto them ; he is filled with all the fullness of the 
Godhead bodily, and we are bid to pray that we 
may be filled with all the fullness of God ; he is in 
us the hope of glory ; we are to be crucified with 
him and we are already risen with him. The 
democratic spirit in religion, which holds as its 
fundamental faith that religion is a privilege and 
prerogative of human nature, and that in human 
nature we are to look for both the source and the 
authority of religion, finds its supremest evidence 
and illustration of this faith in the life and char- 
acter of Jesus the Christ. 

It needs not many words to indicate that, if 
religion is of the people, it is also for the people 
and by the people. If the spirit of faith and hope 
and love is inherent in the human spirit, as are the 
appetites and passions in the human body, then 
it cannot be other than a universal religion. This 



214 THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY 

life is not for the Jews only, but also for the Gen- 
tiles ; not for the baptized only, but also for the 
unbaptized; not for the elect only, but also for 
the non-elect ; not for the saints only, who give 
themselves up to lives of meditation and prayer, 
but for the average man, and is fitted to inspire 
and control the average life. It belongs not to 
Jews as Jews, nor to Christians as Christians, nor 
to saints as saints, but to man as man. Some spir- 
itual souls are more fruitful than others, but there 
are no arid lands. Spiritual suicide may be possible ; 
personally, I think it is. But spiritual life is cer- 
tainly possible; no man is shut out from it. Pagan 
religions are not devilish imitations devised to de- 
ceive the unwary. They are real beginnings of a 
life which has its supremest inspiration and its 
supremest manifestation in Jesus the Christ. And 
it is for this reason that he is the Christ. 1 

Because this religion of faith and hope and 
love, of doing justly and loving mercy and walk- 
ing humbly with God, is the universal inheritance 
of the human race, it knits us together in the bond 
of a fellowship which transcends all other fellow- 
ships. Political Democracy unites us in nations, 
Industrial Democracy in trades, Educational De- 
mocracy in a Republic of Letters; but Religious 
Democracy unites men of all nationalities, trades, 

1 Philippiaus ii, 5-11. 



SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY IN RELIGION 215 

and social classes in a universal brotherhood. 
Because one is our Father which is in heaven, 
because we are all his offspring and share in 
his life, we are all brethren. 



($lbe niticrsibc prcsfrf 

CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 




I. "*. 






1 Js J^~ r. «.V ri* 



U* 







,^°- 



.•i-e* 







LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

■ inn mil inn — 



022 021 586 6 



